elfwreck:

all-is-for-all:

“As early as the 1920s, researchers giving IQ tests to non-Westerners realized that any test of intelligence is strongly, if subtly, imbued with cultural biases… Samoans, when given a test requiring them to trace a route form point A to point B, often chose not the most direct route (the “correct” answer), but rather the most aesthetically pleasing one. Australian aborigines find it difficult to understand why a friend would ask them to solve a difficult puzzle and not help them with it. Indeed, the assumption that one must provide answers alone, without assistance from those who are older and wiser, is a statement about the culture-bound view of intelligence. Certainly the smartest thing to do, when face with a difficult problem, is to seek the advice of more experienced relatives and friends!”

— Jonathan Marks – Anthropology and the Bell Curve (via leofarto)

see also:

Psychology Is WEIRD (Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries.): Western college students are not the best representatives of human emotion, behavior, and sexuality.

WEIRD subjects, from countries that represent only about 12 percent of the world’s population, differ from other populations in moral decision making, reasoning style, fairness, even things like visual perception.

Something that doesn’t make it into the WEIRD acronym is the participants’ age. Sixty-seven percent of American psychology studies use college students, for example. This means that many or even most of the subjects are teenagers.

A lot of our testing methods have swarms of built-in biases.