Journal Article

Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens

Ginges, Jeremy, Martingano, Alison Jane, Rad, Mostafa Salari

2018

Overview

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.

• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
• Subject: Cognition & reasoning / Culture / Hominids / Human populations / Populations / Psychological and Cognitive Sciences / Psychology / Sackler on Pressing Questions in the Study of Psychological and Behavioral Diversity / Social Sciences