Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that "American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners--outliers among outliers."

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

Perhaps I should go back to my old sig line: "If sanity be culturally normative then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity."

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Anthropologists implicitly understand the basic thesis these researchers propose - culture makes people really different.  That basic understanding is deeply ingrained into every major approach to the understanding of culture.

However, Anthropology as a discipline has become wedded to particular political positions which make this knowledge dangerous to express.  We oppose stereotypical reductionism and racist logic as a matter of course - people are diverse and complex.  But if we actually go about listing and explaining and defining these differences and complexities, our work becomes a tool that can be used to reinforce other bodies of knowledge in a racist and reductionist manner.  The masters could use this understanding of culture to govern and oppress more effectively - which is intolerable, as most Anthropologists are touchy-feely leftists.  

So, the potential political consequences of our research lead to immense self-censorship, both in the choice of topics and in the manner of presentation.  Most notably, there's no harm in writing narrative deconstructions of the discursive construction of the self, because no one has the faintest clue what you're talking about except the select elite.  Further, this style of approach has its own benefit, in that leads the initiated towards an almost mystic contact with the intellectual truth of the matter.  You come to know it, more than understanding it.

After having written this, it reminds me of nothing more than medieval Alchemy.  Real understanding of chemistry was coded and hidden in such a way that only the adept could see, and which was intuitively understood in a holistic manner.

It's no wonder that everyone ignores Anthropology.  But as this article makes clear, our contempt for the other social sciences was more or less justified, and for the same general reasons we intuitively felt to be true - they were ignoring the vast and immense differences created by culture, and this seriously tainted all their research.