Two of the experiments involved humor. In one, 29 European Americans and 26 East Asians wrote about either death or dental pain, then read a series of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips and rated how funny they found them.
East Asians who had been contemplating their own mortality found the strips funnier than those who had been thinking about dental pain. The reverse was true of Westerners.
Clearly, something was wrong with the methodology, because the absolute, unrivaled hee-larity of Calvin and Hobbes transcends both nationality and uncomfortable circumstances. I mean, that’s just a scientific fact.