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.'"

Comments

That only works in an sorta uniform population

[whitroth]

What we have in the US is a completely non-uniform population.

*rant*
  I mean, the people who vote for the neoConfederate Tea Party Republicans, and the funniementalist who claim to believe in Jesus as love, and want to create a dictatorship to make sure everyone belives as they do don't even live on this planet.
*/rant*

The US is completely fractured - the so-called "culture wars" are literally talking about complete, non-geographic or semi-geographic societies. To try to come to conclusions with that - and I haven't read the article, but I'll wager it's a very small sample size - is ludicrous.

              mark

Re:If you wanted to know about humans,

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, sophisticated and civilized people worldwide have learned to use a bidet and leave the toilet paper to the dumb unwashed masses. Toilet paper merely smears your ass with shit. So, yes, primitive indeed.

Non-human and proud of it

[Tailhook]

Innovation in 'social science' amounts to finding new ways to disparage Americans specifically, and more generally anyone with the temerity to emulate them. These are professional malcontents; the finest hate-mongers on Earth, teaching us all what we are to loath. Hindu hut-dwellers are about the only form of humanity not subject to their highly refined contempt.