Psychology research is still fixated on a tiny fraction of humans – here’s how to fix that

Nearly 95 per cent of participant samples in a leading psychology journal were from Western countries By guest blogger Jesse Singal For a long time, some psychologists have understood that their field has an issue with WEIRDness. That is, psychology experiments disproportionately involve participants who are Western, Educated, and hail from Industrialised, Rich Democracies, which means many findings may not generalise to other populations, such as, say, rural Samoan villagers. In a new paper in PNAS, a team of researchers led by Mostafa Salari Rad decided to zoom in on a leading psychology journal to better understand the field’s WEIRD problem, evaluate whether things are improving, and come up with some possible changes in practice that could help spur things along. For their paper, nicely titled, “Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population,” Rad and his colleagues pulled two samples of articles published in Psychological Science: all articles published in 2014, and the last three issues from 2017. Unfortunately for the field of psychology, they found little evidence to suggest that Psychological Science, published by the US-based Association for Psychological Science, has addressed the WEIRD problem. Looking at the participant groups in the subset of the 2014 articles in which authors included demographic information, “57.76% were drawn from the US, 71.25% were drawn from English-speaking countrie...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: guest blogger Methods Source Type: blogs