Abstract
Psychology must confront the bias in its broad literature towards the study of participants
developing in environments unrepresentative of the vast majority of the world’s population. Here,
we focus on the implications of addressing this challenge, highlight the need to address over-reliance
on a narrow participant pool, and emphasize the value and necessity of conducting research with
diverse populations. We show that high impact-factor developmental journals are heavily skewed
towards publishing papers with data from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich and Democratic). Most critically, despite calls for change and supposed widespread awareness
of this problem, there is a habitual dependence on convenience sampling and little evidence that the
discipline is making any meaningful movement towards drawing from diverse samples. Failure to
confront the possibility that culturally-specific findings are being misattributed as universal traits has
broad implications for the construction of scientifically defensible theories and for the reliable public
dissemination of study findings.