Psychology takes a global view

[This article is part of the 2025 Trends Report]

Psychological science is going global, seeking larger, more representative samples and tackling issues not solely of interest to WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) nations.

Technology is one key factor enabling global collaborations, facilitating connections across oceans and time zones. Likely more important, though, is the commitment of psychologists willing to tackle administrative complexity and set up international projects despite funding structures set up for single-lab research and journal policies that do not always favor consortiums of dozens or hundreds of members. Moving into 2025, researchers who do this work say to watch for more collaborative projects spearheaded by psychological researchers from Africa, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and other locations where behavioral science is underresourced.

“What I’m looking forward to on the horizon is the further inclusion of the Global South, not just as data collectors but as people leading the research,” said Miguel Silan, a doctoral student in psychology at Université Lumière Lyon 2 and the assistant director of the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), an international network of nearly 2,500 researchers whose goal is to enable rigorous psychological science. “Or even as collaborations within the Global South, banding together to tackle shared national urgent issues across these different countries.”

International collaborations are a natural outgrowth of “big team science,” an effort dating to the early 1990s that aims to bring together many labs and many researchers to collect data from large, diverse samples of people. Crossing borders can be a boon for reproducibility and generalizability. It can enable comprehensive studies of large global problems, such as climate change and political polarization. It is also a way to test whether a common assumption—that results might vary across culture and context—is actually true.

“Almost all of the questions that psychologists ask have an assumption that there’s going to be heterogeneity across regions or across people,” said Brian Nosek, PhD, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia and the executive director of the Center for Open Science. Nosek collaborated on Many Labs, a 10-year-long project that attempted to globally replicate selected findings in psychology. When these findings failed to replicate, he explained, people did as they had often done, pointing to geographical or cultural differences as a possible explanation despite the fact that those moderators had rarely been tested directly. The Many Labs research team found that, despite occasional cultural variation, findings that replicated tended to replicate across cultures and geographies while findings that did not replicate tended to fail everywhere (Klein, R. A., et al. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2018opens in new window).

Many Labs wrapped up in 2022, but global collaborations are increasingly institutionalized, with organizations like the PSA working to connect large teams of researchers across borders. Many of these collaborations explicitly take an open science approach, which involves preregistering hypotheses, methods, and analyses; making data freely available; and publishing in open access journals or making preprints available so that results are accessible to everyone.

The Network for International Collaborative Exchange (NICE), run by Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology, aims to connect researchers at small, underresourced psychology programs, where it can be difficult and costly to gather large subject pools. “We’re trying to open up to areas of the world where people are not often collecting data,” said Martha Zlokovich, PhD, the former executive director of Psi Chi and the president-elect of APA Division 52 (International Psychology).

NICE has been coordinating one annual global study on a different psychological topic since 2018. Member labs submit proposals, and one is chosen each year. Participation has been steadily growing, said Zlokovich. Researchers from six countries participated in data collection the first year. In 2023–2024, 50 institutions in 18 countries contributed.

In 2024, Psi Chi also launched a National Science Foundation-funded training conference, IGNITE (Innovating Global Networks to Inspire Tomorrow’s Experts), to teach students about transparent research practices and encourage global collaborations. The first, highlighting the need to open more research opportunities to undergraduates, took place in New York City in November and drew more than 800 registrants, far exceeding the organizers’ hopes for 150, Zlokovich said. (The team put together a virtual option for the overflow.)

The Many Labs concept is now also ubiquitous, with collaborations ranging from ManyBabies, an infant-research consortium with collaborators from more than 50 countries, to ManyManys, a collaboration to compare cognition across different animal species, to ManyLabs Africa, a preregistered replication project that aims to flip the usual WEIRD-centered research pipeline by taking effects first found in Africa and replicating them in North America, Europe, and other African populations.

ManyLabs Africa aims to correct “the underrepresentation of African researchers and African thoughts in psychology,” said Adeyemi Adetula, ManyLabs Africa’s lead researcher and a doctoral student in psychology at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. Africa is projected to be home to a quarter of the world’s population by 2052, Adetula said. “We cannot ignore this population,” he said.

The project team is replicating three studies first conducted in Africa and arising out of African cultural contexts. One is on how parents perceive teen pregnancy in rural Nigeria, another is about the role of gender in condom-use negotiation among high schoolers in Ghana, and the third is on how Mozambican women respond to their husbands’ extramarital affairs in the context of a cultural expectation to ignore and forgive the infidelity (Mgbokwere, D. O., et al. Global Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2015opens in new window; Teye-Kwadjo, E., et al. South African Journal of Psychology, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2018opens in new window; Vera Cruz, G., Sexuality & Culture, Vol. 22, 2018)opens in new window.

A global view of psychology can also improve the credibility of measurement, Adetula said. Researchers around the world use different scales to measure psychological outcomes, such as depression and well-being. Though these scales are often seen as interchangeable, they may not be (Fried, E. I., Journal of Affective Disorders, Vol. 208, 2017opens in new window).

Silan and his colleagues are currently testing the extent to which two universal human experiences—relationship quality and loneliness—are experienced similarly across cultures. “The form of these concepts may very likely differ not only across individuals but also systematically across cultures,” he said.

Two teams of researchers are conducting in-depth interviews in six to nine countries from different regions to get an ethnographic basis for defining the two terms, Silan said. The next step will be validation, which will expand the research to ideally dozens of countries to ensure the usefulness of the scales.

While bridging cultures, many researchers are also looking to bridge the gap between academic research and psychological practice. Studies based around questionnaires or online tasks are fairly simple to repeat from lab to lab. More difficult are studies that focus on clinical populations, largely because different nations have different ethical requirements, said Ekaterina Pronizius, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLouvain in Belgium.

“Clinical psychology needs big team science,” Pronizius said, “but it’s very hard to do.”

Pronizius is currently working on a cross-European project probing the self-other distinction in borderline personality disorder. Even within Europe, institutional review boards require different information for approval, and varying laws around medical privacy can limit what kind of questions psychologists can explore. Complicating matters, different countries may follow different diagnostic guidelines, meaning that study populations with a given diagnosis may not be entirely similar.

International clinical collaborations have the potential to be high-impact, though, Pronizius said. Between-population differences in psychological diagnoses, such as anxiety, lead to speculation over whether culture can decrease or increase risk for specific disorders. Country-specific factors, like trust in institutions or social cohesion, may also inform the risk of psychopathology. Comparisons between countries are easiest to interpret, she added, if researchers studying these questions work together from the beginning and use the same measurements and outcomes.

Big team science and global collaborations are not infallible, even with their frequent focus on transparency. In September 2024, an influential paper in Nature Human Behaviour arguing that high replicability of new social and behavioral findings is achievable through open science methods was retracted after outside researchers noticed that not all of the analyses had been preregistered and that the original study design was not targeted for the outcomes that were ultimately reported. (Nosek was a coauthor on this study, originally published in November 2023.) The controversy highlighted the fact that open science requires scrutiny.

Nor does a large international sample necessarily mean a fully representative sample. For example, in 2022, a paper led by Kai Ruggeri, PhD, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University, found that temporal discounting, or a preference for immediate rewards over future ones, was generalizable across 61 countries in a sample of more than 13,000 people (Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 6, 2022opens in new window). But a revisiting of the sampling methods led by Sakshi Ghai, PhD, an assistant professor in psychological and behavioral science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, found that the study participants were disproportionately young, well educated, urban, and digitally connected (Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 8, 2024opens in new window). While big team science holds enormous potential for increasing diversity, Ghai and her coauthors wrote, researchers need to be aware of the limitations of their sampling. Organizing large collaborations can also be a serious challenge, said Jay Van Bavel, PhD, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. “These projects are just a beast,” he said. “It’s just an incredible amount of administrative oversight.”

Funding still remains a challenge, especially for researchers in low- and middle-income countries, Silan said. Many big team science projects are done as add-ons to a researcher’s regular project and are unfunded. The ability to get a representative sample is correlated with the Human Development Index (HDI) ranking of the country where a researcher works, Van Bavel said. (The HDI is a measurement of health, life span, education, and standard of living.) It is often difficult for researchers to share funding across national borders when they do have it. “We need to have solidified support for groups like the PSA and ManyBabies and others,” Nosek said.

Researchers from lower-HDI countries are nevertheless pushing into leadership roles. In Brazil, researchers from the National Institute of Science and Technology on Social and Affective Neuroscience are aiming to replicate findings from the United States on reducing partisan animosity (Voelkel, J. G., et al. Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2023opens in new window). Silan and his colleagues are working on a Templeton World Charity Foundation-funded project to set up human flourishing research hubs in Southeast Asia and the Arab region, hoping to replicate the success of the PSA and promote a Global South lens in the research literature. “I am from the Philippines,” Silan said. “If not for the studies like those from the Psychological Science Accelerator, we probably wouldn’t have that kind of representation, at least not in mainstream psychology.”

Meanwhile, the Global Psychology Alliance, an international network of more than 60 psychological science associations of which APA is a member, will be developing its next 2-year road map at its next summit in Jamaica in March 2025, with the Jamaican Psychological Association taking a leadership role.

The work is interesting and energizing, Pronizius said. “There are a lot of experts who are really motivated to be part of these collaborations,” she said, “despite the difficulties.”