Joseph Henrich is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. His 2020 book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Become Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a massive 680-page study explaining why most of our studies of psychology and sociology and economics are seriously biased, since our samples typically consist only of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic people (and most of them students at that). His point is not only that such people (that’s us) are different, even at a neurological level, from other people, but that they are an outlier in many respects, thoroughly untypical of the human race as a whole.
This is a strong claim, but he backs it up with many studies and much data. And it is important, because the WEIRD world (that’s us again) has the power and wealth these days, and is trying to shape the rest of the world without understanding how different the rest of the world really is, how differently they see things, how different are their values and expectations and cultural norms. This is not a light read, but it is well worth the effort.
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