Editor's Introduction for the Special Series: Diversity Science

摘要

The journal occasionally publishes a series of articles on a topic of cutting-edge research that will advance our understanding of mental health and illness. The goal is to feature diverse models, methods, disciplines, approaches, and domains of research that might transcend any particular disorder or intervention. This series is on diversity in clinical psychological science and highlights a topic of enormous breadth and significance. Indeed, diversity is and has been a core concern and topic of psychological science and scientific research more generally. In relation to ethnic and minority group issues, 40 years ago marks the publication of the first edition of the classic book, Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology (Guthrie, 1976). Fast-forward to now, the concern about the representativeness of participants includes ethnicity and culture but extends to a more global perspective and, in that context, the extent to which findings generalize to diverse groups. For example, there has been increased concern that most of the participants in our research are WEIRD, an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and from Democratic Cultures (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Many findings obtained with WEIRDos as they are sometimes called do not in fact generalize to other groups. Evaluation of research suggested that approximately 67% of psychology studies in the United States rely on undergraduates as subjects (Arnett, 2008), although this was well before the current proliferation of online recruiting of participants (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk).