PSYCH 291 University of Waterloo Cultural Sampling & Psychological Biases Discussion

I’m trying to learn for my Psychology class and I’m stuck. Can you help?

• reflect on how some common sampling practices in psychology may have produced a culturally biased understanding of the mind and behaviour, and
• discuss this topic with other students and the instructor, which will allow you to engage with and apply some of the concepts about sampling methodology that were covered in this module.

Recent research has identified cultural biases in psychological research samples. Most psychological research has been conducted with highly educated, relatively wealthy participants in Western cultural settings. As we mentioned in the section on convenience samples, psychologists have typically assumed that the processes that they study in their experiments are so fundamental and universal that they could be generalized to people broadly speaking. However, researchers who have conducted cross-cultural investigations of psychological processes have discovered that many phenomena that psychologists assumed are universal may actually reflect distinctive cultural attributes of highly educated Westerners. These results raise intriguing and important questions about the external validity of much psychological research.

For this discussion assignment you will read an article that reviews this controversy and describes some of the key findings that raised questions about the generalizability of the results of research that was conducted with undergraduates at Western universities. Here’s a link to the article:

We Aren’t the World

After you read the article reflect on the information and arguments that it contained and formulate some observations and insights that you can post to the discussion.

Here are some sample questions that you might consider to guide your reflections:

• Are you convinced that ethnocentrism and class biases in sampling have led psychologists to develop a distorted view of the human mind?
• Did you think of other demographic or cultural groups that might be underrepresented in psychology research but that weren’t covered in the WEIRD categories that the article emphasized?
• Going forward what do you think psychologists can do to avoid some of the concerns about sampling bias that were raised in this article?
• The article speculated that Western researchers might be particularly biased to overlook possible cultural boundaries to generalizing research findings because of the ways that growing up in a Western environment shapes cognition. What did you think about this argument?
• Do you have any ideas about how you could test whether Western researchers have an especially strong blind spot for recognizing limitations of the generalizability of research findings?