Psychology’s in Trouble

Psychology has a character flaw that it does want to acknowledge or do anything about. When it comes to psychology research, majority of the population does not include people of minority groups. Psychology is very aware of this issue due to most studies focusing on a particularly small population. Another thing is that due to the lack of diversity in these psychological studies, certain populations are technically not able to be looked at because statistically there were not enough participants to be able to make statistical inferences about them. In a good amount of analytical papers, people of minority groups aren’t even mentioned because the amount of them was so small. More often than not, psychology is able to recognize this issue and continue to promote more diverse populations when presenting a study. Even though studies are constantly still coming out with a white majority population. It just doesn’t seem fair that they continue to promote more diverse populations but are not able to find people from minority groups to be in their study. There needs to be a fundamental change in how participants are collected in order to incorporate minority populations because obviously the current way is not working. Psychology needs to be able to claim they have data on more populations than just white if they really want to claim that they understand humans as a whole. In research classes, students are told that we must have a diverse population and in a way expect us to just be able to figure it out. It needs to be a change that starts now and will gradually change over time so that way people of racial minority groups feel as if they are also important and included when it comes to human discoveries.

1 thought on “Psychology’s in Trouble”

  1. I don’t really think that psychology as a whole has an answer to this. As a result they just don’t address is. No one really has an answer to this because it is considered unethical to study minority populations just because there isn’t enough information on them. Researchers have to be so careful when addressing minority populations and really need to make sure they are properly educated before starting research. This is an extremely difficult topic and definitely one that Psychology needs to better address.

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