Cross-cultural, developmental psychology: integrating approaches and key insights

Abstract

Like psychology more broadly, developmental psychology has long suffered from a narrow focus on children from WEIRD societies-or those that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. In this review, we discuss how developmental scientists have sought to correct this bias through two complementary approaches: one centered on detailed, ethnographic investigations of child development within populations (increasing the depth of our understanding) and one focused on larger, multi-site studies that test children on standardized tasks across populations (increasing breadth). We review key papers from each of these approaches, describe how they are currently practiced, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Next, we highlight exemplary papers from the adult literature that offer useful insights, namely the importance of formal modeling and a greater focus on studying variation at multiple levels of analysis. We end by outlining best practices for future waves of cross-cultural, developmental science. Overall, we argue that a more integrated perspective, combining the strengths of the breadth & depth approaches, can help better elucidate the developmental origins of human behavioral diversity.

Do human ‘life history strategies’ exist?

“…This excludes the influence of the other individuals who typically care for children in most societies (Crittenden & Marlowe, 2008;Kramer, 2005;Meehan, 2005;Page et al, n.d.). Models of the early development of life history which focus on the cooperative childrearing that most children experience may be more productive in understanding the mechanisms through which early stress affects later life traits, especially in populations which place less emphasis on the nuclear family than WEIRD societies (Amir & McAuliffe, 2020;Clancy & Davis, 2019;Geronimus, 1992;Morelli, Henry, & Spielvogel, 2019;Sear, 2016).…”

Interdisciplinarity Can Aid the Spread of Better Methods Between Scientific Communities

“…Competing traditions of more rigorous work in the evolutionary human sciences including in human behavioral ecology, gene-culture coevolution theory, and also by some more rigorous evolutionary psychologists (c.f. Gurven, 2018;Amir and McAuliffe, 2020;Barrett, 2020b), point to promising avenues for future reform.…”

The Two-Front Forever War: Moral Nativism and Its Critics

“…If this first, empirical debate was the only debate that scholars could continue to collect more and more data on what infants can do, and what they experience, earlier and earlier in life. This research would also need to include similar evidence of early emergence and social experiences in non-Western communities, in addition to the Western communities from which most of the current evidence comes (Amir & McAuliffe, 2020). This body of research would, presumably, converge on the asymptote of whatever it is that most infants can do given the kinds of experiences most infants receive.…”