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

Primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal, and the way context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. Yet most research published in our leading journals has relied on sampling educated populations from the west. 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. Yet as we show here, almost all research published by one of our leading journals, Psychological Science, relies on western samples and, in an unreflective way, uses this data 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.