Bard, Keller, and Leavens provide a 5-step process for reforming developmental psychology theory and research to make it more worldwide, in situ, local, and diverse (WILD). Unfortunately, they forgot to include Step 0: researchers have to actually want to change their practice. The accumulated evidence indicates that they do not.

To be sure, Bard et al. provide a compelling argument for why researchers need to revisit developmental theories in light of their global representativeness. I agree with nearly all of it. And yet, their article does not really include any new data or sets of arguments that have not been made before, at least in spirit. Rather, it is just another entry in the pantheon of articles documenting the lack of diversity – in samples, researchers, and/or perspectives – and arguing for change.

Guthrie’s (Reference Guthrie1976) classic book, Even the Rat was White, was arguably the first prominent treatise laying out the lack of diversity in psychology and its corresponding implications for knowledge generation. By the 1980s, researchers started to conduct systematic analyses of journal publications to produce clear data in support of Guthrie’s core observations. One of these was specifically about developmental psychology, focused on the frequency and nature of developmental studies with Black children (McLoyd & Randolph, Reference McLoyd and Randolph1984). This approach of quantifying representation in published work, both by race/ethnicity and nation, quickly took hold, with a steady stream of similar articles ever since (e.g., Cortina, Curtin, & Stewart, Reference Cortina, Curtin and Stewart2012; Graham, Reference Graham1992; Lin & Li, Reference Lin and Li2022; Ponterotto, Reference Ponterotto1988). Several of these have been specifically about developmental psychology (e.g., Cauce, Ryan, & Grove, Reference Cauce, Ryan, Grove, McLoyd and Steinberg1998; Moriguchi, Reference Moriguchi2022; Nielsen et al., Reference Nielsen, Haun, Kärtner and Legare2017; Rowley & Camacho, Reference Rowley and Camacho2015; Syed et al., Reference Syed, Santos, Yoo and Juang2018). Moreover, follow-up analyses of previously published articles have indicated that not much has changed over time (Arnett, Reference Arnett2008; Hartmann et al., Reference Hartmann, Kim, Kim, Nguyen, Wendt, Nagata and Gone2013; Nagayama Hall & Maramba, Reference Nagayama Hall and Maramba2001; Thalmayer, Toscanelli, & Arnett, Reference Thalmayer, Toscanelli and Arnett2021). Some of the articles in this genre have been extremely prominent, such as Roberts et al. (Reference Roberts, Bareket-Shavit, Dollins, Goldie and Mortenson2020) on racial diversity and, of course, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (Reference Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan2010) on WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) samples and perspectives.

This is just a sampling of previously published articles on this topic – there are many, many more. Some of them provide descriptive data on the representation of different groups in published work, some of them are conceptual analyses of the problems and implications of lack of diversity (e.g., Bard et al.), and most are a bit of both. All of them point to the same conclusion: psychology has serious problems with the diversity of the samples used in studies, with the diversity of researchers conducting the research, and with the diversity of perspectives informing its theoretical and methodological work (see Syed & Kathawalla, Reference Syed, Kathawalla and McLean2022). Bard et al. acknowledge that the problem “has been known for many years” (sect. 1, para. 5) and state in the opening line of the paper, “Psychologists are aware that bias can creep into our scientific practices in a number of ways” (sect. 1, para. 1). Fifty years of raising awareness and gaining an understanding of the problem with little evidence of change, so what gives?

At this point, we simply must recognize that psychologists have no interest in changing their approach. From its early days, psychology revealed an interest in becoming a discipline that generates universal claims about behavior and mental processes. As the field came of age toward the middle of the 20^th century, it committed to modeling itself after the natural sciences, in which legitimate knowledge was defined as quantitative in nature and universal in scope (Rogers et al., Reference Rogers, Moffitt, McLean and Syed2024; Syed, Reference Syed2023). There has been no turning back since.

The arguments laid out by Bard et al., while compelling and meritorious, run counter to the goals, priorities, and interests of psychologists as researchers and of psychology as a discipline. Bard et al. suggest that there are “many sources of anthropological research that can be used” (sect. 4, para. 2) to expand psychologists’ perspectives, but how likely are they to do so given the field’s prioritization of integrating biological perspectives over cultural ones? After all, psychology is well known for having physics envy, not anthro envy. Bard et al. “advocate by beginning with ethnographic studies” (p. 40), but how likely are psychologists to do so when they don’t consider qualitative methods to be legitimate or within the scope of the researchers’ methodological toolkit? Moreover, how are they to do this when there is nearly zero training in ethnographic (or any qualitative) methods in psychology departments? The proposals in Bard et al. amount to little more than telling psychologists to stop what they are doing and start doing something totally different, something in which they have neither interest nor training in doing.

None of this is to say that resignation is the answer. Those of us who are committed to making the discipline more contextual and inclusive absolutely should advocate for ways of doing so. At this point, however, we can confidently state that inaction towards diversifying psychology is not due to a lack of knowledge, compelling data, convincing arguments, or clever acronyms. Rather, the lack of inaction is driven by psychologists’ priorities, values, and goals that they see as endemic to the field – one that is universal, decontextualized, and generalizable. Without recognizing this fact, we will continue writing papers that urge change in our approach, and continue to see very little change indeed. The reality is that psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD.