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We Aren't the World: Why Americans Make Bad Study Subjects
Lasrick writes "This is just fascinating: Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics, and explain why social science studies of Westerners — and Americans in particular — don't really tell us about the human condition: 'Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"
Everyone is human, but Americans are outliers. If you could only study a small handful of people, they would be an awful choice. They are not representative of the average. That is one of Henrich's minor points. If you were trying to predict the average human behaviour, and had to leave out a country, the US would be one of the best choices, because it is so different.
The trend of studying only Americans was a result of cultural blindness. Paraphrasing the article: multiculturalism purports that all cultures are unique and special and have interesting intrinsic attributes, but academics refuse to discuss them because they don't want to be accused of racism or stereotyping. To avoid the question, they assumed that everyone was alike, and just chose to study people who were readily available (usually the undergrads at their campuses.)
Henrich et al. have shown this to be a bad decision, and have presented data that shows the study samples were not only deeply skewed by being from a Western, (culturally) European, industrialized, rich, and democratic country, but also that the United States was very atypical of other countries that met those same criteria.
The ultimate goal of the article isn't to claim that Americans are somehow no longer worth study, though, just that you can't make assumptions about everyone else based on how they act. They're accusing everyone else of cherry-picking, and want to encourage samples from around the world to be considered equally. That being said, though, the article doesn't discourage studying any particular group: it has a couple of observations about differences amongst American populations, too.
I'm kinda getting the vibe that you're a radical isolationist. You may wanna work on that.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Way to entirely miss the point.
First of all, the American rebels started with just hunting rifles, with no cannon or other serious military gear of the time. The Revolutionary War got started because, against all odds, the rebels sucessfully captured armories.
But really, that's not the point. If you're fighting against actual military equipment, it will be a civil war, and both sides will have actual military equipment - that's not why you need an armed populace. Tyranny never starts with the Army being sent against civilians - that just defines the point at which tyranny has won.
Tyranny starts with Brownshirts. Unofficial (but government sponsored) death squads that pull people out of their houses in the middle of the night and disappear them, or just shoot them right there in the street. That beginning is where an armed populace can fight back. There are historically only a handful of people willing to be Brownshirts. If only 10% of that armed 30% are brave enough to actually fight back, then the Brownshirts lose, and tyranny falters.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The first two seem like positive things to me.
The point of the article is not that they are good or bad, but that they are not normal. Americans are not just different on these issues, they are the most extreme. In no other society is "fairness" to strangers more given or expected. Americans are not only more likely to offer a "fair deal" to a stranger, but they are also more likely to pay a price to punish an unfair defector.
The researchers found that in some societies, not only is stinginess tolerated, but excessive generosity is punished. The reason given is that in these societies, accepting a gift incurs an obligation to reciprocate. So the generosity is rejected to avoid the future obligation.
Americans are often surprised when they travel abroad, and see foreigners walk unconcerned past someone in obvious need of assistance. We are also sometimes surprised at other societies' intolerance for dissent or non-conformity. Americans say "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", but the Japanese equivalent is "the nail that sticks up will be hammered back down," which expresses the opposite sentiment.