psmag | again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly
unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors,
and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the
human bell curve.
In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf)
By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits
and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world,
it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even
the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the
planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among
Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual,
leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are
exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers
among outliers.”
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. Fist tap Dale.
