We're so quick to frame crabs as cruel for pulling each other down when they try to escape buckets, yet we too rarely focus on the person who put them in the bucket in the first place.
The same goes for the idea of mantises eating the heads of their mates (apparently an artifact of lab conditions) and of the "alpha wolf" idea (wolves were forced into the company of unfamiliar wolves), among other facets of "common knowledge."
How many assumptions about human behavior follow this pattern?
@jaycie
A lot of psych research is on college students in USA, which has been shown to be a real outlier in terms of individual over group etc compared to most other groups of people.
Basically the lab artifact you mention, but from using a non-representative sample and drawing conclusions about human nature everywhere.
@TheMysteriousEm @jaycie Yep, they are WEIRD
"WEIRD is the phenomenon that plagues a lot of psychology and other social science studies: Their participants are overwhelming Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries. They’re WEIRD. And not only are they WEIRD, they are overwhelmingly college students in the United States participating in studies for class credit"