Nature - Most people are not WEIRD
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Christian
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"Experimental findings from several disciplines indicate considerable variation among human populations in diverse domains, such as visual perception, analytic reasoning, fairness, cooperation, memory and the heritability of IQ. This is in line with what anthropologists have long suggested: that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies — and particularly American undergraduates — are some of the most psychologically unusual people on Earth."
"The evidence that basic cognitive and motivational processes vary across populations has become increasingly difficult to ignore. For example, many studies have shown that Americans, Canadians and western Europeans rely on analytical reasoning strategies — which separate objects from their contexts and rely on rules to explain and predict behaviour — substantially more than non-Westerners. Research also indicates that Americans use analytical thinking more than, say, Europeans. By contrast, Asians tend to reason holistically, for example by considering people’s behaviour in terms of their situation. Yet many long-standing theories of how humans perceive, categorize and remember emphasize the centrality of analytical thought."
"To understand human psychology, behavioural scientists must stop doing most of their experiments on Westerners, argue Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7302/abs/466029a.html
I think cultural differences in cognition is quite a interesting topic. Maybe the relationship between midland Europe and Eastern countries created the continental philosophy which forms the basis for most humanities.
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