Why American Psychology Needs To Become Less Us By Jeffery J Arnett Analysis

The article written by Jeffery J Arnett focuses on the arguments and criticisms on “why American psychology needs to become less American”. The main concept that Arnett argues is that modern psychology is secluded to the United States rather than being based on a broader section of the human population. This idea comes from analysing the current world population and noticing that “psychological researchers in the United States restrict their focus to less than 5% of the world’s total population” (Arnett 2008) therefore resulting in 95% of the world population being neglected, hence Arnett’s choice in the title of this article. He believes that in order for psychology to become an accredited science it needs to represent the entire world population,
However, this idea is contradicted by the fact that other wealthy countries such as Japan are rarely included within research. Denmark (1998) observed that American students were limited on their knowledge of international research. Perhaps it isn’t due to the fact that limited research occurs within other countries, it’s due to the fact that American Journal Author’s ignore findings from other countries. The second reason focuses on the fact that Arnett noticed that psychology has defined itself on the natural sciences such as biology and chemistry (Cahan & White, 1992; Rozin, 2001, 2006). He portrays this as a problem because these types of sciences only identify simple processes and neglecting the fact that human cultural is more complex and diverse. Arnett’s definition of science because he believes that it is defined by its ability to conform to real-world problems (Haeffel, Thiessen, Campbell, Kaschak & McNeil,