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Weird people, yes, but also weird experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2010

Nicolas Baumard
Affiliation:
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PN, United Kingdom. nbaumard@gmail.comhttps://sites.google.com/site/nicolasbaumard/Home
Dan Sperber
Affiliation:
Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 75005 Paris, France. dan@sperber.frhttp://www.dan.sperber.fr/

Abstract

While we agree that the cultural imbalance in the recruitment of participants in psychology experiments is highly detrimental, we emphasize the need to complement this criticism with a warning about the “weirdness” of some cross-cultural studies showing seemingly deep cultural differences. We take the example of economic games and suggest that the variety of results observed in these games may not be due to deep psychological differences per se, but rather due to different interpretations of the situation.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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