Findings uncovered a significant bias among members of research teams. The research community should take action, authors argue.
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Edited by Douglas L. Medin, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and approved July 25, 2018 (received for review January 16, 2018)
Abstract
Two primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. However, most research published in our leading journals has relied on sampling WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. One might expect that our scholarly work and editorial choices would by now reflect the knowledge that Western populations may not be representative of humans generally with respect to any given psychological phenomenon. However, as we show here, almost all research published by one of our leading journals, Psychological Science, relies on Western samples and uses these data in an unreflective way to make inferences about humans in general. To take us forward, we offer a set of concrete proposals for authors, journal editors, and reviewers that may lead to a psychological science that is more representative of the human condition.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: gingesj{at}newschool.edu.
Author contributions: J.G. designed research; M.S.R. and A.J.M. performed research; M.S.R. analyzed data; and M.S.R. and J.G. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “Pressing Questions in the Study of Psychological and Behavioral Diversity,” held September 7–9, 2017, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA. The complete program and video recordings of most presentations are available on the NAS website at www.nasonline.org/pressing-questions-in-diversity.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data reported in this paper are available through Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/t2r87).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1721165115/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population
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