Psychology studies too reliant on college students

The field of experimental psychology operates mostly in research universities.  So their test subjects tend to be 20-something-undergraduates volunteering for research projects to get extra credit.  That is not the world’s most representative population.  (I volunteered for some of those experiments myself, and I remember how seriously I took them, which was not very.)  A few years ago, the profession began to realize that this bias can skew research findings.

From Psychology Studies Biased toward Western Undergrads – Scientific American:

Anyone familiar with psychology has probably heard a statement like this: A significant percentage of male & female undergraduates displayed X when prompted by Y. And typically the conclusion of the study is something like: So humans display X in the presence of Y. Taking the behavior of undergrads and extending it to all of humanity is an intriguing leap, right?

To be fair, for research purposes, undergrads are cheap and accessible. But, as noted by the blogger Headcase, such terms are better used to describe a hot date rather than good data.

Well, a group from the University of British Columbia recently published an enormous meta-analysis on the danger of assuming that all of humanity closely matches the behaviors of 20-something college students. They cite evidence that between 2003 and 2007 undergrads made up 80 percent of study subjects in six top psychology journals, and that 96 percent of all psychology samples come from countries that make up only 12 percent of the world’s population. They call this the WEIRD population—Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic—and say that they are the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.

[Keep reading. . .]

HT:  Mary Moerbe