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"Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"

Are they saying all the Americans are fat birds, unable to fly?

If one was trying to scientifically "draw broad generalizations" about humans, why would you ever select samples from just one nation (regardless of which one)?
Use a dozen nations, some more developed than others. Heck, use one hundred nations. How else would you be abled to defend statistically valid results?

Leaving out any arbitrary set of 330 million humans would seem to lead you further away from meaningful conclusions. Are Americans not also human?
Singling out one country for inclusion or exclusion sounds like something other than impartial, apolitical science for drawing "broad generalizations".

If you don't like America (or wherever), that's fine and dandy... but please don't call your hand-picked findings the "human condition". Especially if you're going to choose the humans based upon any one individual's peculiar set of ideals.

The instrumental goal underlying a lot of psychology and economics research is "what should we do in the U.S.?" It's all dressed up in basic-science, idealistic language, but ultimately what the penguin taxpayers funding the research most care about is penguin economics and penguin psychology, not so much the rest of the birds...

Now scientifically proven! ;)

It should be possible to mod an entire article as flamebait...

*grabs popcorn*

The article isn't actually about the Western world, or how Americans are "bad study subjects". Rather, the research TFA talks about is indications that Western assumptions about cognition are based on Western culture, rather than biological design*. In essence, the researchers acknowledge that some of the basic fundamental ideas of perception may not be so fundamental.

It really has nothing to do with Americans being inherently bad study subjects. Rather, it accuses the field of anthropology of focusing too heavily on a single (though changing) culture throughout its history. In other words, sampling bias exists.

* "Design" In the "structure and function" sense, not the "somebody intentionally built this" sense.

Uh, that's because America is diverse as fuck. Hell, humanity is diverse as fuck.
Trying to draw accurate yet broad generalizations about humanity are impossible.

This summary has almost nothing to do with the underlying article, and the headline draws a completely erroneous conclusion. It isn't about Americans being bad study subjects at all, but rather the idea that extrapolating between two cultural groups that have vastly different environments is much harder than previously thought.

A sentence from the cited article might explain the different behaviour experienced when running the "Ultimatum" game with the Machiguenga

So if one offers a valuable and rare commodity to people living a life near sustenance, one gets other results than if one does the same experiment with people who have most of their needs (over)fulfilled and do not need the stakes of the game? That is IMHO not surprising but quite in line with Maslow's hierarchy of needs [wikipedia.org].

Maybe social scientists (and economists) should start to evaluate the context of their experiments more carefully. Alas they are missing the 'laws of nature' [slashdot.org] whose violation leads to checking every plug.

In the last election cycle the Republicans tried to point out that what America calls poor would not be called poor in most other nations. But they got lots of flak and backed off. But there is some truth in noting that "there is no food in the fridge in my kitchen" sounds crazy to people who don't have homes, and those who do don't have kitchens, and those who do dont have fridges! It like the story about the poor written by a rich kid. "There was a poor man. His butler was poor, His chauffeur was poor, His cook was poor and so was his maid.

A household barely on the poverty line in USA [givingwhatwecan.org] is richer than 80% of the world! About 10% of the world, [globalissues.org] or 700 million people or twice the population of USA, lives in less than $365 a year! Again these dollar figures are not the foreign exchange rate based dollars. These are "purchase power parity" dollars. Which means the $365 buys in the poor country, what $365 would buy in the USA.

So the conclusions of this study are rather obvious.

In the late eighties, I (like many other undergrads) were required to "volunteer" to be the subjects of psych and sociology studies when we were in intro psychology classes.

I talked a good bit with a particular political science prof whose specialty was survey research and the measurement of public opinion. I noted that no reasonable researcher would try to extrapolate such a biased sample to be representative of the world population. He pretty much agreed and lamented the situation.

Yet, that was exactly what was being done. Ignoring the myriad flaws in the research I could see with just the viewpoint of participating, none of the people doing the studies that I talked to saw any reason to control for the completely unrepresentative sample.

They were quite happy to make predictions equally about inner city youth, Appalachian rural elderly and middle aged residents of The Hamptons all from studies that were exclusively late teen early twenties college students.

I was appalled that this "goop" might end up being used as the basis for social policy decisions.

Henrich's approach to the ultimatum game seems flawed. He mentions that he offers the equivalent of a few days wages, which is probably too much. The game is usually played for significant, but smaller sums, such as the value of a free lunch. For a sufficiently large starting sum, even tiny portions are enough to be worth something. For example, if you were asked to decide on a split of $200 out of a total $2000, you would probably want to spite the splitter. But you would also probably be overruled by your desire to get a free $200. It's only when we start looking at a smaller total with similar proportions -- say, $2 out of $20 -- that we start to see small portions being worth sacrificing to spite the other guy.

Proportionality is a bad metric in this scenario, and he should probably use some thing like "hours of equivalent labor" instead. (And in that case, he better hope everyone is used to making equal amounts of money in such an hour, which is certainly not true in Western societies.) By sticking to proportionality as a metric long after it becomes meaningless, Henrich buries the signal in noise. He has made it too easy for the splitter to "buy off" the decider.

The Pacific Standard description of the game also misses the point when they say that (for Western subject) the game tends towards and average 50/50 split. The average isn't nearly as interesting as the highest refused split/lowest accepted split, which tells you exactly how much someone is willing to sacrifice to spite the other party/the minimum "fair" proportion. This figure tends to be down near 30%. (It is up for debate how the subjects are internalizing this number as fair... whether it is closer to, say, "half of an even share (25%)," or "half of what the splitter makes (33.33%)," or some other figure.)

He is correct in that it will be culturally influenced. That is a big part of the point. In fact, when the experiment was originally devised, it was considered surprising that people would refuse any split at all. It is, after all, free money split between anonymous parties in exchange for no work at all. The reason people behave in this "illogical" manner is because reputation has worth, and if you want to avoid being cheated in society, it pays to have a reputation for being spiteful and willing to take a small loss to inflict punishment on those who wrong you. No transaction happens in a vacuum. The point is that the social gaming conditioning "leaks through" into our behavior even though the experimenter has (usually) done his best to remove all social components that would reward such spiteful behavior.

Now, Henrich has spent a few years doing this sort of thing, and it's been looked over by plenty of competent people, so I'm presuming his team's understanding is really not so shallow as it is presented here. But still, it is a bit odd to look at this collection of anecdotes that seems to demonstrate "culture matters" and come away with the conclusion that Westerners, and especially Americans, are weird. This is especially true when so many experiments of the previous century were aimed at identifying cultural behaviors and disentangling them from basic human response... in essence, all experiments which prove both that humans are similar (because they respond similarly under highly controlled conditions) and that culture matters (because that what influences them to behave slightly differently under different conditions). An experimenter has to be keenly aware of the culture under test, because experiments can amplify subtle differences if it doesn't account for them.

From the experiment with the Machiguenga (follow link in summary) , the split between players matters less then it does in 'Western' (i.e. American) society. They are much more likely to share their wealth among the tribe after the game is over. So it doesn't matter who walks away with what amount during the game.

From a practical point of view, the giver in the game has more certainty of getting his share up front than he does in trusting the (outsider) sociologist to give the remainder to the other participant as agreed. So get the money now and split it with the village afterwords.