The BIG idea

Usain Bolt.

Labels like ''world's fastest man'', ''tallest woman'', ''smartest 10-year-old'' and ''best basketballer'' lead to the question: what if the person who truly deserves the distinction has not come to the record keepers' notice?

Say the fastest runner lives in obscurity on the plains of Mongolia or the tallest woman lives where Guinness World Records has never come to town?

In The Weirdest People in the World, Joseph Henrich and colleagues at the University of British Columbia showed how generalisations about human nature from experiments in behavioural sciences such as psychology, cognitive science and economics lead to distorted perceptions of reality.

Research published in prestigious journals and publicised by the media usually relies on an unrepresentative or ''WEIRD'' population, which is to say Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic.

In the top psychology journals between 2003 and 2007, 68 per cent of study subjects came from the US and 96 per cent of subjects were from Western industrialised countries with only 12 per cent of the world's population - specifically the US, Europe and Australia, as well as Israel.

Of the US samples, two-thirds of subjects were composed solely of undergraduates in psychology courses (80 per cent in the other countries).

Comparisons with other groups suggest this is ''among the least representative populations one could find for generalising about humans''.

They are outliers, yet the leading journals and textbooks consistently publish research that extends their findings from ''weird'' undergraduates to the species.

The conclusion? ''We need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.''