Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2025 Jul 18;57(8):229.
doi: 10.3758/s13428-025-02751-x.

Digital pathways beyond Western-centric participants

Edmond Awad  1   2   3
Affiliations
Review

Digital pathways beyond Western-centric participants

Edmond Awad. Behav Res Methods. .

Abstract

In 2010, Henrich and colleagues published a seminal article in which they noted that (1) studies in social and behavioural sciences oversample from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) individuals, and (2) WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared to the rest of the world population with respect to several factors. Despite the positive reception of this article, not much has changed in the years to follow. For instance, reviews of recent papers in leading psychology journals reveal that only a small proportion of the studied samples originate from non-Western countries. This sampling bias cannot be excused for lack of means. The digital age has opened several opportunities to facilitate and support social science research with subjects from non-WEIRD backgrounds. In this article, I provide an overview of such tools and comment on the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Keywords: Cross-cultural research; Cultural generalisability; Digital data collection; Online platforms; Survey methodology.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval: Not applicable. Consent to participate: Not applicable. Consent for publication: Not applicable. Conflicts of interest: No conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Percentage of the regional location of samples published in the Psychological Science journal in years 2014 and 2017 (first three issues) (Rad et al., , Tables 1 and 2) and year 2023 (first three issues)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Arnett, J. J. (2008). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. The American Psychologist,63(7), 602–614. - PubMed
    1. Atari, M., Xue, M. J., Park, P. S., Blasi, D. E., & Henrich, J. (2023). Which Humans?10.31234/osf.io/5b26t
    1. Awad, E., Bago, B., Bonnefon, J.-F., Christakis, N. A., Rahwan, I., & Shariff, A. (2022). Polarized Citizen Preferences for the Ethical Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in 20 Countries. MDM Policy & Practice,7(2), 23814683221113572. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R., Schulz, J., Henrich, J., Shariff, A., Bonnefon, J.-F., & Rahwan, I. (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature,563(7729), 59–64. - PubMed
    1. Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Shariff, A., Rahwan, I., & Bonnefon, J.-F. (2020). Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,117(5), 2332–2337. - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources