For example, there’s a culture in which people don’t experience the Müller-Lyer illusion—which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.
The anthropologist Colin Turnbull described what happened in the former Congo in the 1950s when a BaMbuti pygmy, used in living in the dense Ituri forest (which had only small clearings), went with him to the plains:
And then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles away, far down below. He turned to me and said, ‘What insects are those?’
At first I hardly understood, then I realized that in the forest vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, Kenge was looking for the first time over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison...
When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies. (Turnbull 1963, 217)
Because Kenge had no experience of seeing distant objects he saw them simply as small.
They also fail to check on whether a behavior is as universal as they think it is.
Male and female are not important explanatory categories
Yeah, you definitely have to beware of WEIRD psychological samples, too.
For example, there’s a culture in which people don’t experience the Müller-Lyer illusion—which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.
Which culture?
According to the PDF about the WEIRD psychological samples, the San foragers of the Kalahari desert.
Another “interesting” bit of trivia: the ability to look at something very far away and understand that it only looks small is a learned skill, not an innate one.
Original source
Taboo “learned/innate skill”. Is everything except what feral children do a learned skill? If not what do you mean?
Here is one possibility:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/656735