Here is my experience with this:

I grew up the eldest sibling of a struggling single Mom. We didn't have very much. We had to make every penny count. She spent every spare penny we had one year on our first computer to teach herself to program to get herself a better job so we could have an easier life. I was 8. It was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. She had to sacrifice a lot to afford that computer. In comparison, I was surrounded by the friends, the majority of whom had what seemed like a cushy life compared to what I knew. That computer was the start of my career. I scoured the manuals and the programming books my Mom bought and taught myself everything I could about it. I took it apart, I tried to understand the hardware.

The town I grew up in had a university that was heavily interested in computer science. When I was a teenager, my girlfriend's mother and father had programmed the university computer systems with punch cards. All my friends had home computers. Amstrad CPC64, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron. Even with the accessibility I had to a community that were into computers with friends who were into computing and programming, it was hard to find information. The internet hadn't yet been made publicly accessible. You had to beg, borrow and steal books and manuals to try and make progress and share with your friends. This made you dig into things and probe them to understand them.

There is no clear delineation between being a hacker and not being a hacker. You either have the mindset to leverage everything you know to achieve your goals or you don't. It can be learned, sure, but most people don't look beyond the surface of anything. Relationships. Life. Computer systems.

A hacker cares very little about the surface. They want to understand every little nuance. They want to understand how it works, why it works the way it does. Their exploration to extend their understanding uncovers bugs. Most people stop at understanding the features and finding bugs. The hacker wants to understand the bugs too. Why does it occur? When does it occur? What conditions trigger it? What are the implications of it? They want to understand everything.

One thing I've found lacking in the psyche of most of the North Americans I know (not to exclude all of them by any means) is that they don't tend to look under the surface of well, anything. They see the system for what it is and they think about it in the manner in which it was designed to be used. They apply the right tool for the right job.

A hacker is more like a farmer who doesn't have an unending budget to buy the exact right tool for every little job they need done. "I've gotta get this job done, I don't have the right tools for the job, but I do have this other pile of junk over here. How can I use that to do what I have to do?" and hack something together, warts and all.

When you grow up in a situation with pretty much an unending ability to do whatever you desire and the only person standing in your way is yourself, you don't tend to need to think much like a hacker. You just go buy the right tool for the job and get the job done. No more thought is given to it than that.

Conversely, when you grow up with nothing, you figure out how to make do with what you can get your hands on. You develop a hacker mindset. The USSR for all the years I was a kid seemed to have nothing. They learned to get by with and exploit what they could get their hands on. They developed a hacker mindset.

This is just my experience with the people I know. I'm not tarring all of the U.S. with this by any means.