American Psychological Research Generalizable

In Is American Psychological Research Generalizable to Other Cultures, two psychologist, Gerald Haeffel and Jeffery Arnett discuss their reason for supporting their beliefs on the topic of American psychological research generalization to other cultures. This is an important topic within psychology because the decision on what to do will affect how psychologist are allowed to do studies and it could also possible make it harder to construct research because the participant will be harder to find. This will be harder because right now most psychological research is done at colleges and university and that will not be able to happen if they need to find people and participants from all over the world.

Summary:

In this reading they are discussing

In the article it says, ""Studies using one sample of humans (e.g., Americans) often generalize to other samples of humans (e.g., Spaniards)" (p. 570). Even adding Spaniards to Americans (and throwing in Canadians for good measure) still makes for less than 5% of the world's population. Psychologists are far too quick to jump from one study of Americans and one study of Spaniards to a declaration of a universal psychological principle."(The Neglected) What he is trying to say is that when people are researching people even when they are trying their best to make sure the group is diverse you can never call it a declaration of a universal psychological principle because in most cases you are still only representing 2 or 3 sample or humans. According to The Neglected 95%, a Challenge to Psychology's Philosophy of Science, Haeffel and colleagues, "they claimed that I suffer from a "fundamental misunderstanding about basic research" and that my position is "akin to asking why medical research continues to focus on growing stem cells when there are more daunting problems such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease" (p. 570)." (The Neglected) Arnett's claims that Haeffel's response to his claim that basic processes research value is wrong and the relation between basic research and human problems is not very clear even to a research psychologist. I have

I think that it is important that researchers make sure they aren't making assumption of one group of humans based on another and that they research the specific group of people they need to to make sure that they are fully understanding what they are reporting. I learned that research can be a very complicated procedure and that research have to make sure they aren't false reporting facts that are for all humans when they only studied college students that volunteered for the study. This is important to psychology because it is important to understand researching and what the important factors of certain thing are on the research project. This is also important to humans as a whole because psychological research can help us understand how and why certain groups of people live like they do. It helps us understand that psychological factors can change as you go fro group to group but also how things can be the