Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population
By Mostafa Salari Rad, Alison Jane Martingano, Jeremy Ginges. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018
631 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e83190dff430cfe6cf21cc631ba09b2f86326ab9
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Social Psychology
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Racial Inequality in Psychological Research: Trends of the Past and Recommendations for the Future (2020, positive): “Below, we contextualize our findings and propose concrete recommendations for how to meet the field’s stated goal of generating representative knowledge (Medin, 2017; Rad, Martingano, & Ginges, 2018).”
- 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): “These observations are consistent with prior criticisms of psychology being not only western-centric but too exclusively representative of the United States (Arnett, 2008; Christopher et al., 2014; Henrich et al., 2010; Rad et al., 2018).”