Looking Beyond the American Lab Posted on January 7, 2008 Kenneth H. Rubin (bio) cautions against ethnocentrism.

Americans get very comfortable in their labs, and they get comfortable in their constructs, and they get comfortable in their methodologies. And again, Canadians don’t as much because they are on the outside looking in. It really is a different culture, just as people from Germany who are attending this meeting, or Australia who are attending this meeting, or Italy who are attending.

So name the country — nobody has the same sort of sense of American ownership of construct, of theory, of methodology, of statistical machination. No one has that same sort of ownership perspective, and as a result, when things cultural and international are being presented at American congresses, because there is a foreign or international flavor to it, it’s rejected, in a way, or abandoned. And that’s rather disconcerting, and I think that one of the problems with American graduate education is a sense of tunnel territoriality, that you don’t get to see broader perspectives.

And so from my perspective, I think that we’re doing a disservice to our graduate students and to our young scholars by making them much more ethnocentric. Now, the Society for Research in Child Development has a new mandate to become more international, and I think the American Psychological Society has the same goal, so it’s actually changed its name to the Association of Psychological Science.

But that’s stylistic rather than substantive, and the substance would be not changing names and not forming committees, but actually getting the scholars in our field to look beyond the American lab.

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