Profiling the Chinese Participants in Psychological Science: Non-WEIRD but Not Representative

Psychological science aims at understanding the human mind and behavior, but it primarily relies on participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic regions, i.e., the WEIRD problem. This lack of diversity and representativeness of participants compromises the generalizability of psychological science. To address this issue, large-scale international collaborative projects have been initiated, and more data have been collected from non-WEIRD regions. However, it is unknown whether participants from non-WEIRD regions can represent their local population. In this preregistered report, we depicted the demographic profile of Chinese participants reported in 1, 000 empirical studies (n = 554, 794) published in five mainstream Chinese psychological journals and in 27 large-scale international collaborative projects (n = 29, 006, accounting for 2.12% of all participants). We found that age and sex were the most reported demographic variables, and other aspects of participants were less reported. The available demographic information revealed that Chinese participants were not representative of the population: most were young and well-educated people from east coast provinces (with the exception of Hubei province, which is located in central China). The demographic profile of Chinese participants in psychology is similar to their counterparts in many other countries and regions, suggesting the globalization of young and highly educated participants in psychological science. Together, our findings indicate that problems of representativeness are deeply entrenched in global psychological science and require coordinated cross-sector efforts.