Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York, NY 10011.
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Nov 6;115(45):11401-11405. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1721165115.
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, , 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.
心理学科学的两个主要目标应该是理解人类心理学的哪些方面是普遍的，以及情境和文化产生可变性的方式。这要求我们在撰写论文和抽样的人群类型时，考虑到文化和情境的重要性。然而，我们领先期刊上发表的大多数研究都依赖于抽样 WEIRD（西方、受过教育、工业化、富有和民主）人群。人们可能会期望我们的学术工作和编辑选择现在能够反映出这样一个知识，即就任何给定的心理现象而言，西方人群可能并不代表一般人类。然而，正如我们在这里所展示的，我们领先期刊之一发表的几乎所有研究都依赖于西方样本，并以一种不加反思的方式使用这些数据，对一般人类做出推断。为了向前推进，我们为作者、期刊编辑和评论者提出了一系列具体的建议，这些建议可能会导致更能代表人类状况的心理学科学。
