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Psychological experiments need human participants. Typically, the participants of psychological studies are university students because these are the most easily accessible kind of people for psychology researchers. But this can be a problem. In psychology, we are not just interested in finding out how the mind of a university student works; rather we are interested in finding out how the mind works in general. Can we learn about how the mind works in general from psychological studies involving only university students?

Uncritical optimism on this issue has been questioned in recent years. It has been suggested (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzaya 2010a, 2010b) that most psychological studies published in major journals rely on the participants in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, who are in fact highly unusual in many psychological aspects:

[P]eople from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies – and particularly American undergraduates – are some of the most psychologically unusual people on Earth. So the fact that the vast majority of studies use WEIRD participants presents a challenge to the understanding of human psychology and behaviour. […] Strange, then, that research articles routinely assume that their results are broadly representative, rarely adding even a cautionary footnote on how far their findings can be generalized. (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzaya 2010b, 29)

We will come back to this problem in Chapter 4 when discussing cross-cultural studies of moral judgments (e.g., Haidt, Koller, & Dias 1993; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller 1987).