In psychology, there often is a common demographic among research subjects. And among the researchers, themselves. And, in its own way, among research questions, processes and interpretations.

A few years ago, a University of British Columbia research team and came up with an acronym for this demographic: WEIRD, or Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. WEIRD people, WEIRD research, WEIRD-generalized results.

The trouble is, three 91̽�� researchers say in a new article, that the field of psychology tends to overlook, or even leave out, people, cultures and issues that could be labeled “non-WEIRD”: people of color, of different socioeconomic classes, levels of education and cultural traditions. And that has implications for how the science is interpreted and applied, and how it actually reflects society.

While ideas of diversity aren’t new to the field, the actual process of diversifying has been slow in coming. It’s time, the 91̽��authors say, to change.

“We’re talking about an entire field that has many people and institutions, and how you change longstanding practices and functions,” said , a research scientist in the 91̽��Department of Psychology.  “We’re saying, take a step back and ask, what is the culture cycle that drives the practices in our field? Let’s look at what our institutions can do, practically speaking, to get more people paying attention to culture, and build a knowledge base with a working understanding of how culture shapes people’s behaviors and thoughts.”

Brady wrote the , along with 91̽��psychology professors and . The piece was published online Nov. 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper represents a call to action, the authors say, to enhance the “interpretive power” of psychology — “the ability to understand individuals’ experiences and behaviors in relation to their cultural contexts.” They point to various ways that existing practices overlook the importance of culture, and to how individuals and institutions can be more inclusive.

One frequent practice, the authors say, is generalizing research results, which starts with a lack of diversity among subjects in a given study. College campuses — the populations of which are largely white and middle class — make for a ready pool of participants, and then when results are reported, the language is empirical, as if all people think, behave or act in a way that was determined from studying a much smaller sample.

Demographics are not always reported in the description of a study’s methods, Shoda said, and there is generally little attention to how the results might reflect populations that weren’t represented.

“There has been a tremendous challenge in how you go from findings involving specific individuals to building a science of human beings,” he said.

The issue of generalizing research findings can also apply to media coverage of those findings, Shoda said. Take a of delayed gratification among a group of children, a revisiting of questions and methods from what is known as the “marshmallow test” from decades ago. Shoda, who was involved in both studies, points out that the new study clearly identified the limits of the study pool. But one headline implied that “kids today” are better at holding out for a treat than kids from a generation ago. Too general, Shoda said of the headline, despite the fact that he and his co-authors had explicitly cautioned against generalizing from the findings. More research, the authors noted, would need to be conducted among diverse populations.

The PNAS paper also explains how research tends to leave out underrepresented, or non-WEIRD populations, or ignore the cultural factors that could affect results. For example, Native Americans, who, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, number 5.2 million nationwide, were the subject of about stereotypes, prejudice and relationships, the authors say. And in less than 0.5 percent were Native Americans mentioned at all. Fryberg reported those findings in an earlier paper.

“A lot of times, Natives are left out of a sample, and instead of oversampling, we just leave out the group. Natives experience all kind of prejudice in this country, and yet people don’t think we exist,” she said. “We have a lot of responsibility as scientists to make sure science is an accurate reflection of society, and for the most part, we don’t live up to that obligation.”

The authors suggest several solutions: developing “culture conscious” research questions and placing more value on ethnographic observations; revising the language that’s used to report research findings and adding details about study samples; and among journals, funders and institutions, supporting and highlighting research that focuses on non-WEIRD populations.

“As a science, we’ve gone forward without engaging with ideas of inclusion, so scientists and those who read our papers too often assume that if the paper is peer-reviewed and published then it reflects basic, fundamental ways of being,” Fryberg said. “We’re trying to lead people to a more accurate understanding of human functioning—one that reflects other good and legitimate ways of being, calling into question the universal. This can be threatening to people in powerful positions. But science depends on our ability to be relevant to the global world, and we’re trying to call out the science to meet that challenge.”

###

For more information, contact Brady at laurab33@uw.edu.

Five years ago, Nature — one of the most prestigious research journals in science — published an pledging to improve on the low number of women editors and authors in its pages.

For many readers and scientists, that acknowledgement was a long time in coming. Yet with the hindsight of today’s re-examination of the treatment of women at all levels of society, the editorial could seem almost prescient.

In the time since that editorial, however, not much has changed, according to a new 91̽�� study published and cited in a printed March 7 in Nature. The preliminary study, by 91̽��psychology professor and doctoral student , finds that many high-profile neuroscience journals had a low representation of female authors. For example, fewer than 25 percent of Nature research articles listed women as the first author — usually the junior scientist who led the research. Among last authors — typically the senior laboratory leader — just over 15 percent were women. Nature’s top-tier competitor, Science, had similarly low numbers of women authors.

What most concerned the 91̽��team was that over a 12-year period ending in 2017, the percentage of female authors across these journals showed little improvement: less than 1 percent annually, with many journals showing no increase at all.

For the sake of comparison, the 91̽��team also looked at the number of women who received major National Institute of Health grants during the same time period. Those numbers were much higher, and increased slowly but steadily, with just under 30 percent of grants in 2017 awarded to women.

“These research grants are awarded based on significance, impact and productivity. We shouldn’t see this huge discrepancy between NIH funding and last authorship in high impact journals,” Fine said. It’s particularly troubling, the study’s authors say, given that publishing in high-profile journals is virtually imperative for winning academic awards or positions at top-ranked institutions.

Gender disparities in STEM fields has garnered more attention in recent years. While National Science Foundation-compiled data show that women make up a proportion of STEM faculty, their numbers remain significantly lower than those of men. A 2016 by the Society for Neuroscience showed that a little more than half of neuroscience doctorates are awarded to women, but women make up an average of only 30 percent of neuroscience faculty.

Other studies of gender and authorship have also pointed to the possible contribution of publication bias. A small-scale focusing on Nature Neuroscience, in 2016, showed similar results to the 91̽��findings. And in 2013, a led by the UW’s Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, though an analysis of publications in the JSTOR digital library, found that women also are much less likely to be featured in prominent first- or last-author positions.

The issue extends beyond science: In spring 2017, an at the University of Liverpool found that papers written by female economists took an average of six months longer to get published than those written by men.

For this study, Shen, Fine, and their psychology co-authors research associate Jason Webster and professor, turned to the MEDLINE database of articles, which is hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. They focused on 15 journals that publish neuroscience research, accounting for nearly 167,000 research articles from 2005 to 2017, and analyzed the author bylines using another database that predicts gender based on more than 216,000 distinct first names.

Some journals did have a proportionate number of female authors. The journals with the highest percentage of first authors were Neuropsychology Review (53 percent) and Brain (43 percent); among last authors, numbers were highest in Neuropsychology Review (39 percent) and Current Opinion in Neurobiology (27 percent).

“From our analysis, it is not that women are not conducting research and publishing, they are just much less likely to get their work into the really high-profile journals,” Shen said.

Fine and Shen suggest several solutions for all journals: to record and report article authorship by gender; to train reviewers to avoid bias, provide reviewers with more specific review criteria, akin to those required for grant awards; to adopt double-blind reviewing; or to establish byline quotas.

“It’s ridiculous to think bias isn’t at play in these very elite journals,” Fine says. “There are glass ceilings in technology, in politics, in business. It’s very hard not to believe that this is not just another glass ceiling.”

Increasing the number of women faculty in STEM fields is the goal of the . But if publication presents a barrier, then some universities may be challenged to hire and promote women, said Eve Riskin, 91̽��associate dean of engineering for diversity and access, professor of electrical engineering and faculty director of ADVANCE.

“Research shows that diverse teams lead to better solutions,” Riskin said. “Research also shows that female students in STEM do better when they have female faculty as instructors.  Holding women to higher standards for publication makes it harder for universities to increase their number of female faculty members in STEM and in leadership positions.”

The study’s authors have also made their code publicly available, with the hope that students or faculty in other fields will take on the same challenge, determine the gender breakdown of bylines in a given set of journals, and call for change.

“These journals make a lot of money and wield a huge amount of power. Finding a way to fix this problem is the least they can do,” Fine said. “They are under the same legal obligations to avoid discrimination as other businesses.”

###

For more information, contact Shen at psy.alicia@gmail.com or Fine at ionefine@uw.edu or 206-685-6157.

91̽�� psychology professor has been honored for his ongoing participation in a well-known — and perhaps slightly misunderstood — long-term study about delayed gratification.

The honor is called the , and is given by the , together with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Science Coalition and other agencies.

This year, Shoda is one of three psychologists honored for a famous longitudinal research project that has come to be called “the marshmallow study.” The other two being honored are , now of Columbia University; and , now of Smith College.

The study, started in the 1960s and funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, measured the ability of children 4 to 5 years old to delay gratification. They were given the choice between a single marshmallow they could eat right away or two marshmallows for which they would have to wait.

The researchers published their findings in 1988, and found a significant correlation between how long children were able to wait for the treat and how competent they were later as young adults. Those who showed the ability to wait, the study found, tended to be more socially and academically competent as adolescents. The participants, now well into adulthood, have been evaluated in the ongoing study ever since.

Shoda was a first-year graduate student at Stanford University in the 1980s when his involvement with the famous study began. He said his contribution to the work, aside from data analysis, was the notion that not all waiting behaviors mean the same thing. What they term “instrumental waiting” is the waiting directly for a greater reward, but there is also a less-defined type of waiting that is “more like over-control, or waiting when it’s not necessary to wait.”

More recently, he was principal investigator of a National Science Foundation grant that began to look at brain functioning, and that resulted in a couple of papers, (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).”

While pleased by the honor, Shoda expressed concern about media coverage of the study over the years, and the incorrect notion that parents could predict their children’s fate by doing the study themselves.

“I like to emphasize that the relationships we are finding are far from perfect. And there is a lot of room for change. In fact, many of the preschoolers who did not wait for the treat turned out to be perfectly happy, successful adults. What is most exciting is the discovery of a variety of mental strategies that can turn an otherwise difficult waiting period into something that is doable. And that people can learn such skills.”
— Yuichi Shoda, 91̽��professor of psychology

“So, every time I have a chance I like to emphasize that the relationships we are finding are far from perfect. And there is a lot of room for change. In fact, many of the preschoolers who did not wait for the treat turned out to be perfectly happy, successful adults. What is most exciting is the discovery of a variety of mental strategies that can turn an otherwise difficult waiting period into something that is doable. And that people can learn such skills.”

The Golden Goose Award is a sort of reply to the late Wisconsin ‘s famous that targeted federal spending, often for scientific research, that the senator considered wasteful. The Golden Goose Award was created in 2012 as a sort of reply to Proxmire’s dubious honor, seeking to highlight “seemingly obscure, federally funded research” that has led to major breakthroughs in biomedical research, medical treatments or computing and communications technologies.

Shoda, who earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his doctorate at Columbia University, joined the 91̽��in 1996.

He noted also the seeming irony that many funding sources interested in immediate applications are unlikely to support such research as this long-term work, because they can’t promise that it will pay off.

He suggested funding agencies — not unlike those children five decades back battling the temptations of immediate gratification — should fund basic research in the public interest, “and be prepared for the possibility that it may not lead to anything. But if we don’t fund such research, no breakthroughs can be made.”

“It’s a high-risk investment,” he added. “But if one out of 100 basic research projects you fund results in an amazing breakthrough, to my mind it’s worthwhile.”

The next challenge for this research, he said, is to study those whose behavior did in fact change — who did not wait for treats as children yet became happy adults, and others for whom the reverse is true.

The three recipients will receive their honor in a ceremony Sept. 17 in Washington, D.C., in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.

###

For more information, contact Shoda at 206-543-2640 (the Psychology Department number) or yshoda@uw.edu. Visit to learn more about the 2015 Golden Goose Awards.