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


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 countries (including the US and UK), and 94.15% … sampled Western countries (including English-speaking countries, Europe, and Israel).” The 2017 numbers weren’t much better.

So there’s clearly a problem. But, Rad’s team added, “[p]erhaps the most disturbing aspect of our analysis was the lack of information given about WEIRDness of samples, and the lack of consideration given to issues of cultural diversity in bounding the conclusions”. That is, the articles they examined all too often omitted information that could help other researchers note WEIRDness when it occurs, and all too often explicitly over-extrapolated findings drawn from WEIRD samples. Summing up these problems in the 2014 sample, Rad and his colleagues said: “Over 72% of abstracts contained no information about the population sampled, 83% of studies did not report analysis of any effects of the diversity of their sample (e.g., gender effects), over 85% of studies neglected to discuss the possible effects of culture and context on their findings, and 84% failed to simply recommend studying the phenomena concerned in other cultures, implying that the results indicated something generalizable to humans outside specific cultural contexts.”

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/12/10/psychology-research-is-still-fixated-on-a-tiny-fraction-of-humans-heres-how-to-fix-that/(accessed 21.12.18)