Poll: Unlike Americans, the British don't have heroes

This ties in with previous YouGov research, which has found that Americans are more likely to think of themselves as successful (61%) than British people, and that British people are more likely to call themselves pessimists (29% compared to 19% of Americans).

In the US, Republicans (59%) are more likely to have heroes than Democrats (48%). There are no equivalent partisan breaks in the UK, but there is another similarity: people with the highest household income are more likely to have heroes than those with the lowest (in Britain: 36% compared to 30%; in the US: 55% compared to 48%).

Ernest Hemingway once said that “As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.” In Britain, there is a downward slope in having heroes by age (18-24 year-olds tend to have them by 42-37%; over-60s tend not to by 61-26%), while in America over-65s are most likely to have them (64%).