Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population.

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,

SUBMITTER: Rad MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6233089 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature