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I remember someone, I think it was Joseph Heinrich, pointing out that a lot of psychology should really be thought of as "psychology of the contemporary America

• HPsquared 1y ago
  aka the Streetlight effect. 'A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
• Animats 1y ago
  Or worse, people on Mechanical Turk. Bad sample populations are a huge problem. There's only one really good study on sexual behavior in in the US, called "Sex in America, a definitive survey".[1] It was expensive, but they did it right. They used a random process to select a large number of regions across the US, then random individuals within those regions. There was a mailed survey, followed up by a phone survey, followed up by visits by interviewers, followed up if necessary by paying people to do the survey. The result was 90%+ participation. That's how you overcome selection bias. The main result is that, for the overall population, sex is rather mundane. [1] https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/sexinamericadefi00mich/mode/2up