WEIRD psychology: Social science researchers rely too much on Western college students.

a lot of psychology and other social science studies... participants are overwhelming Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries... not only are they WEIRD, they are overwhelmingly college students in the United States participating in studies for class credit.... from countries that represent only about 12 percent of the world’s population, differ from other populations in moral decision making, reasoning style, fairness, even things like visual perception... Sixty-seven percent of American psychology studies use college students ... many or even most of the subjects are teenagers ... differ in risk evaluation compared to adults, for example, and are more sensitive to reward...
do most WEIRD studies generalize to humanity as a whole? In the case of social punishment, probably not, but in the case of emotional expression, it looks like they do. It depends on what question you’re asking.