The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action

By Mark Nielsen, Daniel Haun, Joscha Kärtner, Cristine H. Legare. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2017

825 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Psychology must confront the bias in its broad literature toward the study of participants developing in environments unrepresentative of the vast majority of the world’s population. Here, we focus on the implications of addressing this challenge, highlight the need to address overreliance on a narrow participant pool, and emphasize the value and necessity of conducting research with diverse populations. We show that high-impact-factor developmental journals are heavily skewed toward publishing articles with data from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. Most critically, despite calls for change and supposed widespread awareness of this problem, there is a habitual dependence on convenience sampling and little evidence that the discipline is making any meaningful movement toward drawing from diverse samples. Failure to confront the possibility that culturally specific findings are being misattributed as universal traits has broad implications for the construction of scientifically defensible theories and for the reliable public dissemination of study findings.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ecc7e9d7b69d105402148de09da052461403613

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Citations in the corpus

Adolescent–Parent Relationships: Progress, Processes, and Prospects (2019, background): “As commentators have noted, however, developmental research, like psychological research more generally (Henrich et al. 2010), is limited in its reliance onWEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) samples (Nielsen et al. 2017).”
Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population (2018, background): “While recent work has shown the persistence of WEIRD samples in subdisciplines (5), we were interested in the persistence of WEIRD samples across the discipline as a whole.”
How USA-Centric Is Psychology? An Archival Study of Implicit Assumptions of Generalizability of Findings to Human Nature Based on Origins of Study Samples (2020, background): “First, it has been established that most publications in psychology involved a vast overrepresentation of samples from WEIRD regions—mostly the United States (Arnett, 2008; Hruschka et al., 2018; Nielsen et al., 2017; Rad et al., 2018).”
Racial Inequality in Psychological Research: Trends of the Past and Recommendations for the Future (2020, neutral): “…1992; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Kline, Shansudhenn, & Broesch, 2018; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; McLoyd, 1990; McLoyd & Randolph, 1984; Medin, Ojalehto, Marin, & Bang, 2017; Nielsen & Haun, 2016; Nielsen, Haun, Kärtner, & Legare, 2017; Rowley & Camacho, 2015; Syed, 2017; Zuckerman, 1990).”
Cross-cultural, developmental psychology: integrating approaches and key insights (2020, background): “The studies reviewed above have contributed greatly to diversity in developmental sampling, helping correct the persistent WEIRD bias in the literature (Nielsen et al., 2017), and have pointed to rich crosspopulation variation in child development.”