Abstract. This working group will tackle the current extreme sampling bias favoring college students and other highly accessible study populations in the experimental social and behavioral sciences. This ongoing disproportionate investment is made even more worrisome by the accumulating evidence that results from these select samples do not generalize well to other populations. This well-documented sampling bias several decades old and is not a new discovery. Furthermore more recent reviews and analyses indicate that this situation has not improved over time, suggesting that calls for broader sampling by themselves are not effective. Instead, what is needed is a systematic analysis of disincentives undermining diversity and incentive structures supporting convenience and inertia over good science practices.
This planning working group will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines whose research represents positive case studies of how to overcome these barriers and the benefits of doing so. The goal of the working group is to develop an action plan for addressing and ameliorating these issues. As a planning working group, it aims to set the agenda for a larger workshop to be held the following year. The aim of the planning working group is to: 1) outline key institutional and methodological barriers to expanding behavioral research to diverse samples, 2) identify existing exemplar solutions to these challenges, 3) brainstorm structural changes that can remove disincentives for thoughtfully expanding samples, including grant opportunities, peer review, tenure policies and training, 4) plan a set of online and offline orientation materials that can be used by researchers as a guide to redressing the WEIRD problem in their own research, and 5) plan a special issue/section of a peer-reviewed journal with articles addressing these issues.