Mentioning the Sample’s Country in the Article’s Title Leads to Bias in Research Evaluation

Abstract

Psychology research from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, especially from the United States, receives more scientific attention than research from non-WEIRD countries. We investigate one structural way that this inequality might be enacted: mentioning the sample's country in the article title. Analyzing the current publication practice of four leading social psychology journals (Study 1) and conducting two experiments with U.S. American and German students (Study 2), we show that the country is more often mentioned in articles with samples from non-WEIRD countries than those with samples from WEIRD countries (especially the United States) and that this practice is associated with less scientific attention. We propose that this phenomenon represents a (perhaps unintentional) form of structural discrimination, which can lead to underrepresentation and reduced impact of social psychological research done with non-WEIRD samples. We outline possible changes in the publication process that could challenge this phenomenon.

Psychology must grapple with Whiteness

“…Indeed, experiences that deviate from white experience are frequently pathologized by psychologists whose own oppressive assumptions go unexamined and unchallenged 5 . Some may note that emphasizing race (and contexts that may signal race, such as sample country) leads to negativity in peer reviews 10 . However, thoughtful racial scholarship does not cause bias; racism does 8 .…”

Diversity and Representation in Infant Research: Barriers and bridges towards a globalized science of infant development

“…Specifically, although we believe that it is important to report sociodemographic characteristics, it is important that doing so does not further perpetuate a master narrative. An example of unintended consequences is provided by a recent study by Kahalon et al (2021). In this study, American and German students evaluated the relevance of psychological articles for a research project.…”

North and South: Naming practices and the hidden dimension of global disparities in knowledge production

“…Failing to disclose the geographical provenance of the empirical evidence in the title, an article's most visible section, might be misleading as to the generalizability of the findings. Readers may tend to interpret these "delocalized" titles as describing universal processes, as is the case with generic statements (DeJesus et al 2019;Kahalon et al 2021). Despite the growing awareness about the pitfalls of such a perspective and the multiple local epistemological alternatives developed by scholars in the global South, the production of mainstream narratives about contemporary social processes remains largely Eurocentric due to the economic, political, and cultural hegemony of the global North (Quijano 2000;de Sousa Santos 2016).…”

“…Several studies have documented the variability in title characteristics and how they affect an article's readership (Sagi and Yechiam 2008). Previous studies have examined titles' length and syntactic structures (Cheng, Kuo, and Kuo 2012;Hartley 2005;Moody 2006;Rath 2010), the use of question marks and semicolons (Hyland 2002), the prevalence of generic expressions (DeJesus et al 2019), and the inclusion of country names (Kahalon et al 2021). Our focus is on exploring, for the first time, the propensity to include geographical references in titles across geographies and sub-disciplines of the social sciences.…”

“…Social science subfields, such as development studies, demography, and political science, may be more likely to study geographically bound problems (e.g., population dynamics or pension systems) and therefore more likely to use a country's names in the title than other subfields, such as psychology. In particular, researchers claiming to study universal problems might resist the call to specify the geographic provenance of their sample (Buyalskaya, Gallo, and Camerer 2021;Kahalon et al 2021).…”