ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Generalizability is not optional: insights from a cross-cultural study of social discounting.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- A manifesto for a globally diverse, equitable, and inclusive open science.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- Construct validity in cross-cultural, developmental research: challenges and strategies for improvement.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Perceived inequality and variability in the expression of parochial altruism.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Big-team science does not guarantee generalizability.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- To produce or not to produce? Contrasting the effect of substance abuse in social decision-making situations.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Monitoring and control processes in mock witnesses in under-represented non-WEIRD samples with high or low educational level.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Cross-cultural study of kinship premium and social discounting of generosity.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Construct validity of international literacy measures: implications for dyslexia across cultures.Journal of cultural cognitive science · 2022Article
- Hadza hunter-gatherers with greater exposure to other cultures share more with generous campmates.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Small-scale utilitarianism: High acceptance of utilitarian solutions to Trolley Problems among a horticultural population in Nicaragua.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Current scientific reforms focus more on solutions to the problem of reliability (e.g. direct replications) than generalizability. Here, we use a cross-cultural study of social discounting to illustrate the utility of a complementary focus on generalizability across diverse human populations. Social discounting is the tendency to sacrifice more for socially close individuals-a phenomenon replicated across countries and laboratories. Yet, when adapting a typical protocol to low-literacy, resource-scarce settings in Bangladesh and Indonesia, we find no independent effect of social distance on generosity, despite still documenting this effect among US participants. Several reliability and validity checks suggest that methodological issues alone cannot explain this finding. These results illustrate why we must complement replication efforts with investment in strong checks on generalizability. By failing to do so, we risk developing theories of human nature that reliably explain behaviour among only a thin slice of humanity.
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Registered trials
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