Cultural Change Over Time: Why Replicability Should Not Be the Gold Standard in Psychological Science

Abstract

By continuing to focus on the necessity for replication, psychological science misses an important and all-pervasive psychological phenomenon: the impact of social and cultural change on behavior. Or put otherwise, our discipline misinterprets failure to replicate behavioral results if we do not consider that social and cultural change can produce systematic shifts in behavior. Data on the connection between social change and behavioral change point to a new role for "replication": not to show that results can be duplicated, but to reveal behavioral effects of sociodemographic and cultural change in the intervening years between original and replicated procedure, whether those be surveys, standardized behavioral procedures, or intelligence tests.

Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens : Making psychological science more representative of the human population

“…In particular, as psychological science has begun to pay more attention to issues that might influence replicability, we were interested in whether scholars have begun to pay more attention to the role of cultural context in influencing generalizability of findings. Discussion of how we choose our samples and how we should report them is likely to produce more generalizable research (9), facilitate integrated data analysis (10), and enhance reproducibility of our findings (11), as well as to possibly diversify our researchers (8).…”

Discrimination based on gender and ethnicity in English and Polish housing markets

“…Interestingly, a previous study on discrimination in the shared housing market in London suggests that discrimination also occurs in England (Carlsson & Eriksson, ). It is possible that social or economic changes have led to a different outcome being observed in the current study (Greenfield, ). One possible force behind social or economic change is that the co‐occurring housing crisis in the United Kingdom, with more than 200,000 vacant houses despite an overall housing shortage (The Guardian, ), has led to more equal opportunities between different social groups as it might force renters to be more receptive to offers.…”

Cultural Changes in Neural Structure and Function

“…In a similar vein, Greenfield's theory of cultural change and human development, which holds that a host of changes have occurred simultaneously in the past couple centuries, urbanization, industrialization, and loosening of family ties, have led to rising individualism as well other cultural shifts such as greater innovation, more abstract reasoning, and greater tolerance (Greenfield, 2013(Greenfield, , 2016(Greenfield, , 2017. In this view, modern urban living in market economies pushes individuals toward greater focus on their own goals and outcomes, weakness traditional social bonds, and encourages modes of reasoning and values that are more conducive to success in these changed social conditions.…”