The famous wake-up call to resesearchers and practitioners highlighted that our knowledge is biased:
- Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
Here are more papers providing additional information on the same theme:
- Schneider, J. M., Behboudi, M. H., & Maguire, M. J. (2024). The necessity of taking culture and context into account when studying the relationship between socioeconomic status and brain development. Brain Sciences, 14(4), 392. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/14/4/392
- Draper, C. E., Barnett, L. M., Cook, C. J., Cuartas, J. A., Howard, S. J., McCoy, D. C., Merkley, R., Molano, A., Maldonado-Carreño, C., Obradović, J., Scerif, G., Valentini, N. C., Venetsanou, F., & Yousafzai, A. K. (2023). Publishing child development research from around the world: An unfair playing field resulting in most of the world's child population under-represented in research. Infant and Child Development, 32(6), e2375. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2375
- Kidd, E., & Garcia, R. (2022a). How diverse is child language acquisition research? First Language, 42(6), 703–735. https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237211066405
- Paradis, J. (2022). What can journals do to increase the publication of research on the acquisition of understudied languages? A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022). First Language, 42(6), 794–798. https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221089171
- Nielsen, M., Haun, D., Kärtner, J., & Legare, C. H. (2017). The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 162, 31-38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.017
"less than 3% of the participants contributing to the expansion in our knowledge of children’s psychological development came from all of Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and Israel combined (which notably contain ∼85% of the world’s population" (Nielsen et al., 2017, p. 34)
Here is some evidence for why considering a variety of cultural viewpoints is important
- Clegg, J. M., Wen, N. J., & Legare, C. H. (2017). Is non-conformity WEIRD? Cultural variation in adults’ beliefs about children’s competency and conformity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146, 428–441. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000275
A transformative theory is needed to center experiences of marginalized communities, acknowledge power differentials and create actions intended to mitigate disparities (Jackson et al., 2018)
- Mertens, D. M. (1999). Inclusive evaluation: Implications of transformative theory for evaluation. The American Journal of Evaluation, 20(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1098-2140(99)80105-2
- Jackson, K. M., Pukys, S., Castro, A., Hermosura, L., Mendez, J., Vohra-Gupta, S., Padilla, Y., & Morales, G. (2018). Using the transformative paradigm to conduct a mixed methods needs assessment of a marginalized community: Methodological lessons and implications. Evaluation and Program Planning, 66, 111-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2017.09.010
