I have often found, upon digging through the actual data that gets published with a lot of studies, that there’s a bit of an issue with regards to specifically who they’ve selected for taking part in the study. There is usually a serious dearth of “baseline normals” participating in these things–It’s like with the Kinsey studies: The subjects for much of his work were really deviant from the norm, because the normals didn’t want to participate in the testing… As well, Kinsey had some serious kinks he was scratching, and skewed the results. Given the fact that most of his survey subjects were sexual deviants in the first place, well… That warped the hell out of the studies, something that wasn’t really put out there in the public sphere until the late 1990s.

You run into the issue time and time again, when you look at a lot of this stuff, and you’re left wondering what’s lurking out there in the general population that we just don’t know about simply because we haven’t included the people who don’t complain about things, or seek out the opportunity to participate in studies. God alone knows how many psychological studies have been skewed to hell and back because the only easily available subjects were upper middle-class college kids…