Is the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample Biased? A Simulation Study

Abstract

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) is one of Murdock's most important contributions to anthropology. Otterbein has ar gued that groups studied by ethnographers with personal ties to Murdock and societies congruent with Murdock's theories of social organization are overrepresented in the sample. The SCCS has become the most widely used sample in holocultural research and the presence of these biases would cast doubt on the research conducted with it. I selected a new standard sample from the Ethnographic Atlas randomly a thousand times to test the possibil ity that Murdock and White's selection of societies was biased and to identify the variables the bias affected. Results indicate that the only significant bias in the standard sample is one toward better described societies.