This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
Thereās an experiment calledĀ āThe Ultimatum Gameā. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject Aās offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.
The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other āsmall scaleā societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.Ā
In fact, theĀ āuniversalā result? Was an outlier.Ā
And thatās the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human natureā¦ even things like optical illusions, justā¦ arenāt.
Ā You can read an article about it here.Ā Ā But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.Ā
