R2. Agreements with our call for inclusivity in developmental theory

In this section, we highlight the fact that all commentators agreed with at least some aspects of our treatise. Some focused their agreement on our critique of the developmental theories, some added important information about variability across cultural settings, many agreed that increased sampling beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic) communities was needed, and others applauded some aspects of our concrete plans for increasing inclusivity in developmental research. Many commentators highlighted the importance of culture in development, although Forbes and colleagues draw our attention to different conceptualizations of how culture and development might be related. Many agreed with their claim that “developmental science needs to consider the context not as a separate component that alters measurements of the underlying phenomenon, but as integral to child development.”

As support for the greater inclusion of children around the world, we must highlight the population maps provided by Borjon and colleagues. They note that only 3% of the world’s population of children under the age of 5 years live in North America and over 80% live in Asia or Africa. These facts make it clear that we should, at the least, be using different developmental benchmarks for children living in non-democratic, non-rich, non-industrialized, or non-Western cultural communities. We note that these labels do not define any single cultural community but indicate the variety of cultural communities that are not Western middle class.

We note that representative systems, such as democracy, while often associated with a Western view, take varied forms globally – such as Athenian, socialist, or communal models – that reflect unique cultural, social, and psychological conditions. Thus, democracy, economic status, industrialization, and education can be and are defined differently across cultures, with interpretations shaped by local histories, values, and experiences. We and most of our commentators agreed that WEIRD communities are not representative of the cultural milieux of humanity and thus do not represent the socialization and learning environments of 97% of the world’s children.

R3. Disagreements about the need for change in developmental theories

Although the vast majority of commentators either agreed with our analyses of SIT/AT or did not explicitly disagree, we discuss in this section the three commentaries (Bjorklund, Thompson, and MacGillivray & Carpendale) that disputed our analyses. Bjorklund, while largely agreeing with the WILD approach we advocated, argues that our critiques of SIT and AT were overly focused on low-level behaviors, arguing that focusing on the higher-level adaptive problems that development serves to address is the more appropriate level for analysis of cultural differences. We note, however, that Bjorklund’s focus is opposed to the theoretical perspectives of both SIT and AT that argue for strong evolutionarily given foundations that originate in the first year of life. He argues that the culturally variable interactive behaviors we discussed (WEIRD and WILD) “reflect an evolved, underlying set of social-cognitive mechanisms that lead to understanding one’s self and others as intentional agents (to varying degrees), which serves as the foundation for all more advanced forms of social cognition,” concluding that there is no need to reject either SIT or AT when viewing these phenomena from this epistemic platform.

We do not agree with at least two fundamental claims that must be true for Bjorklund’s larger argument to hold. First, we do not believe that post-industrial societies are “species-typical”; rather, we believe that the epidemiological shift to industrialization is evolutionarily novel for our species (some examples of novel environmental features include high rates of infant survival, nuclear families, and nomadic labor forces). Evidence is required to evaluate the extent to which behavioral patterns observed in WEIRD settings are “species-typical.” We highlight in our article, and Navarez elaborated, that many aspects of interactions with infants in WEIRD settings (e.g., expecting infants to signal before being given care) are species-atypical (see Bard et al., Reference Bard, Keller, Ross, Hewlett, Butler, Boysen and Matsuzawa2022 for detailed discussion). Additionally, we argue that “proto-conversations” in infant–adult interactions, albeit encouraged in WEIRD settings, is not species-typical, as it is not the pattern observed in many other cultural settings (contra Clay & Crockford). In essence, we consider the idea that biologically adaptive behavior can be discerned in all aspects of extant human rearing practices to be an example of a Panglossian paradigm sensu Gould and Lewontin (Reference Gould and Lewontin1979). Professor Pangloss was a character in Voltaire’s satirical essay, Candide, or, The Optimist (1759), who, “to prove the existence of design in the universe [said] that noses were made to carry spectacles, and so we have spectacles” (Littell, Reference Littell1918, pp. vii–viii). Voltaire’s essay is a critique of naïve optimism, and therefore Gould and Lewontin (Reference Gould and Lewontin1979) characterized the widespread bias to attribute (biologically) adaptive significance to patterns of anatomical structure and development as “Panglossian.” Vicedo makes this point in her commentary when she describes aspects of AT as “paleofantasies.” As she put it: “even if a secure attachment system was adaptive way back then, it does not follow that it is adaptive today, either biologically or psychologically”; we agree. Thus, the mere fact of patterns in development is not evidence of the influence of natural selection on infant development. We think it is problematic to interpret developmental patterns in a small subgroup of human beings, who live in evolutionarily novel, post-industrial societies, as evidence for a biologically given solution to an adaptive problem.

Second, we disagree with the claim that the perception of individualistic agency constitutes the developmental basis for all of higher social cognition because it lacks both historical and global relevance, although we acknowledge it is a popular claim in contemporary (WEIRD) psychological research (especially SIT: Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2019). There are numerous pro-Panglossian philosophical frameworks for social cognition in widespread contemporary use. For example, Dennett’s (Reference Dennett1983) influential defense of the Panglossian Paradigm, with its hierarchy of intentionality (first-order intentionality, second-order intentionality, and so on), is currently very popular among behavioral scientists in developmental and comparative psychology. This philosophical stance is, fundamentally, a hypothesis about reasoning capacities, particularly of young children and animals. In mainstream, contemporary cognitive science, it is widely held that human communication involves inferential processing about the motivations of one’s interlocutors, and according to most versions of SIT, these reasoning capacities pre-date the onset of speech (e.g., Tomasello, 2019). However, there are well-described alternative pathways to the skilled patterns of interactions displayed by preverbal children in WEIRD societies, which do not require the postulation of a capacity for mental state reasoning in infants before they can speak. C. Moore and Corkum (Reference Moore and Corkum1994), for example, described how regular patterns of reinforcement in the social experiences of children (i.e., incidental operant conditioning) could produce the patterns of joint attention skill development typically seen in these populations of children. R. Moore (Reference Moore2017) takes a more pragmatics-based approach to the same phenomena, arguing that coherent patterns of interaction can emerge in children and other organisms without necessarily invoking a biologically given capacity to read other minds. Thus, we think it is debatable whether the social-cognitive mechanisms hypothesized by Bjorklund and others even exist, in reality, let alone that they represent a core adaptive cognitive function for our species (see also Leavens et al., Reference Leavens, Bard and Hopkins2019). For example, Keller and Kärtner (Reference Keller, Kärtner, Gelfand, Chiu and Hong2013) found a significant relation between mirror recognition and empathy, as would be predicted from this hypothesis. The relation, however, exists in German middle-class but not in Indian middle-class children. In the latter cultural communities, empathy is evolving through relational pathways rather than individual autonomy as emphasized in WEIRD cultures. Moreover, even if we agreed with Bjorklund that there was an evolved underlying social-cognitive function for understanding intentional agency in humans, we would not expect to find prototypical examples of it in anomalous, post-industrial societies.

Thompson challenges our analyses of SIT and AT, arguing that we failed to provide “generalizable” alternatives to these theories, that we overused the “anthropological veto,” and that we misrepresented both theories. Regarding generalizability, we (and many others) have argued that psychology is in danger of becoming a globally irrelevant, parochial discipline due to its history of reckless overgeneralization, and that theory development would benefit considerably from more restraint in generalization (although Chan et al. think there is more generalizability than we give credit). We think that overgeneralization is harmful to the development of our discipline, especially without explicit evidence that supports generalization. Moreover, we think that every research endeavor should duly consider the constraints on generality specific to their project (e.g., as recommended by Simons et al., Reference Simons, Shoda and Lindsay2017). Until we can incorporate diverse worldviews (i.e., that do not prioritize any singular cultural community’s voice) into developmental theory, we should not assume the theories are generalizable. Although there are many new voices discussing AT, our critiques are addressing both the core assumptions and the original formulations of how (and why) attachments form in the first years of life. Many of the original assumptions are still in place, and many suggested conceptual changes (such as abandoning the monotropy assumption) are ignored in practice. Kline et al. state that monotropy does not even fit modern Western middle-class family life, as evidenced by most such families’ reliance on non-parental care (e.g., daycare and childminders). With respect to Thompson’s critique of the anthropological veto (what Kline et al. term an “ethnographic veto”), we wield it unabashedly. A definitional aspect of universality is that it applies to all. All people matter when making claims about “human nature”; absent demonstrated universality, claims for general principles of human psychological development reduce to intellectual colonialism.

We also disagree with Thompson’s claim that we misrepresented the theories we critiqued. First, we do not claim that nobody has ever considered the issue of diversity in these domains; we did (and do) claim, however, that such considerations are very far from encompassing the whole of humanity. AT has an almost exclusive focus on the mother but does not provide evidence that all cultural communities value mothers (and other caregivers) in the same way. Thus, stating that AT accepts the reality of multiple caregivers, in contrast to just the mother, remains lip service as long as multiple attachment figures or attachment networks are not realized in research and application. Applying WEIRD-based procedures like the Strange Situation Procedure in diverse cultural communities is a misfit to the reality of many families and an ethical problem (for further discussion see Keller, Reference Keller2022). Second, while it may be possible (but, in our view, premature without WILD-type evidence) to posit generalizable variations on Western-centered theoretical concepts, we wrote this paper to promote the kind of epistemic humility advocated by Chan and colleagues. These authors reflect on the lack of inclusivity in current theories with regard to the diversity of belief systems, cultural values, and views of childhood that, among other factors, affect developmental outcomes in childhood.

There are continuing questions, however, about the value of universality in theory. If we focus on local, in situ developmental outcomes, we would expect to find that “[v]ariation is the universal,” as stated in the title of Kline et al. (Reference Kline, Shamsudheen and Broesch2018). Ramos urges that the pursuit of universality should be replaced with “frameworks that embrace multiplicity, contradictions, and situatedness.” Some types of culturally specific outcomes may be based on universal processes in development. For example, Weisner states the purpose of development is about “shaping a whole person engaged in social life in a community.” Another conception is Keller’s suggestion that there may be universal developmental tasks, or adaptive challenges as framed by Kline et al., that are solved differently in different cultural communities. Adaptation is also proposed as the universal function of childhood (Borjon et al.; Bjorklund; Clay & Crockford; Narvaez), with Weisner discussing the premise that children are “culture acquisition devices.” Vicedo raises cautions about relying on blind adherence to out-of-date conceptions, such as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA), as an explanation for the validity of AT. Additionally, it may be possible to revise current concepts of outcomes to transform them into more inclusive conceptualizations that may be structural universals. For example, Bard et al. (Reference Bard, Keller, Ross, Hewlett, Butler, Boysen and Matsuzawa2022) takes the concept of “joint attention,” which is usually defined in WEIRD forms, and transforms this into a potentially universal concept of “triadic connectedness” as a result of finding diverse forms in diverse communities. Specifically, the concept is broadened to include, for example, engagements that are not visually based (e.g., without mutual gaze or gaze alternation, but are jointly connected via touch or close proximity) and engagements about social activities as well as objects (e.g., while in close proximity, watching and then immediately copying the twirling action of an older child, establishing coordinated joint engagement in a social activity). Using a WILD process of decolonizing the behavioral forms of joint attention allowed these authors to propose an outcome that may be universal at the conceptual level while preserving the value of local and in situ variability. Still, we should consider carefully whether there is value in searching for universality in social cognition, attachment, and other psychological theories. As stated by Ramos, for example, the claims of universality have been used to marginalize groups that are designated as deviant, for example, and some claims are based in systemic racism (e.g., see Morelli et al., Reference Morelli, Quinn, Chaudhary, Vicedo, Rosabal–Coto, Murray, Gottlieb, Scheidecker and Takada2018).

MacGillivray and Carpendale argue that the problem with SIT is not its unrepresentativeness but its individualistic worldview. We think both are problematic, and we agree with much of their argumentation against the “idea that individual cognition must pre-exist for relations with others to become possible”; however, that aspect was outside our focus in this paper (but we have argued for many years that the social environment is sufficient to shape many developmental response patterns germane to SIT: e.g., Bard & Leavens, Reference Bard and Leavens2014; Leavens & Bard, Reference Leavens and Bard2011; Leavens et al., Reference Leavens, Elsherif and Clark2023, among others). We think that our target article takes a first step toward their advice to evaluate, and explicitly state in publications, authors’ worldviews and assumptions about development.

MacGillivray and Carpendale also take issue with our application of the WILD acronym but infuse the acronym with some unwarranted assumptions about its possibly derogatory connotations. These authors seem to want to make WEIRD mean “Western,” but that is not – as we understand it – its meaning, either as originally described by Henrich et al. (Reference Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan2010) or in methodological remedies to the overwhelming dominance of certain subsections of Western, post-industrial societies, such as the WILD protocol proposed by Newson et al. (Reference Newson, Buhrmester, Xygalatas and Whitehouse2021) and advocated by us.

R4. Primary challenges to change in developmental theories

In this section, we discuss the responses that constructively highlight some of the barriers to progress, including, ironically, diversity in our collective understanding of some core theoretical/conceptual issues. We were surprised that many comments focused attention explicitly on the important step of inclusivity in sampling while attending less to our central thesis that inclusive worldviews are essential to revising developmental theories. Finally, we correct what we think are some misunderstandings of the WILD methodology.

One challenge involves the concept of culture. We talk about local cultural communities. A cultural group, in our opinion, is one with shared beliefs, shared ideas, shared attitudes, and shared behaviors. A few commentaries stated that WILD needs to be expanded beyond “cultural” differences to include neurodiverse groups (Gernsbacher et al.), societies undergoing rapid industrialization and globalization (Ma & Chen), marginalized ethnic groups enrolled in child protection interventions (Amici et al.), groups that engage in navigation/wayfinding (Fernandez Velasco & Newcombe), and migrating people (Ding & Kong). Each of these commentaries has important points to make about sampling that, of course, are important in theory-building: Gernsbacher et al. argue that including neurodiverse groups would expand our understanding of different developmental pathways and minimize marginalization; Ding and Kong argue that including groups living in rapidly changing contexts requires thinking of contexts as fluid; Fernandez Velasco and Newcombe remind us that there are lots of contexts in which people develop local cultural adaptations; Ma and Chen argue that investigating attachment across complex caregiving environments highlights “that developmental pathways are context-dependent”; and Amici and colleagues present a valuable perspective concerning how knowledge of diverse cultural parenting practices is necessary to properly interpret satisfactory caregiving of children and avoid marginalizing many immigrant families, e.g., from the Global South (echoed by Weisner). We endorse these specific considerations and state again that the diversity of all communities should be included in psychological theories, noting that the primary focus of (Oppong, 2023a) our target article was on inclusion of diverse worldviews within developmental theories.

In our target article, we clarified that culture does not equate to country (Section 3.1). There are many cultural communities within each of the countries studied for SIT and AT, and we included some references to how within-nation variability impacts development, for example, in rural versus urban within-country comparisons (e.g., Sections 2.1.1, 2.1.2 and 3.2: in Mozambique by Vogt et al., Reference Vogt, Mastin and Schots2015; in Costa Rica by Schmidt et al., Reference Schmidt, Keller and Coto2023) and in poor versus middle-income comparisons in the USA (e.g., Section 2.1.1: Bernstein & Henderson, Reference Bernstein and Henderson1969). Hence, we were puzzled by Newson’s comment that within-nation variability was not but should be included in WILD methods, because we understand the WILD approach to incorporate this variability. Moreover, the terms of the WEIRD acronym imply that sampling has historically neglected large portions of the population, even in post-industrial settings (educated contrasts with less educated, rich contrasts with poor).

We note that being born in a Majority World community does not necessarily or automatically bestow culture consciousness or cultural sensitivity on a scientist. Oppong (Reference Oppong2023a) and Scheidecker et al. (Reference Scheidecker, Chaudhary, Keller, Mezzenzana and Lancy2023) provide a variety of reasons why Majority World researchers may follow the mainstream (i.e., WEIRD) agenda, including (1) university education inculcates the mainstream agenda even when taught in Majority World communities; (2) prestigious academic communities often expect researchers to demonstrate their competence and professional authority within mainstream academic practices; and (3) mainstream agendas may be followed to increase opportunities for success in publishing, obtaining research funding, establishing collaborations, etc. Oppong (Reference Oppong2023b), focusing on the antiracism literature, discussed “Epistemological Allyship” (EA). Although he espouses the value of mainstream scientists supporting, nurturing, and mentoring Academics of the Majority World (AMWs), he strongly advocates for the marginalized to play an active role in decolonizing psychological research (and see Keller, Reference Keller2025). “… I will call on AMWs to lead the discourse rather than to be led. This will ensure that whatever new ways of enacting that are fashioned out will be owned by AMWs…” (Oppong, Reference Oppong2023b, p. 80).

These trenchant observations of the limits and entailments for the successful application of the WILD approach all highlight the complex barriers that exist for those of us who wish to amplify the voices of the Global Majority in the construction of psychological theory. The diffusion of epistemic authority from Western scientific traditions to a truly global science is, we think, a generational project. Yet we agree (with Newson; Ramos; Chaudhary & Tuli; Cunha & Thomas; Singh; Zhu et al.; Borjon et al.; Syed; and MacGillivray & Carpendale) that WEIRD academic communities must take substantial responsibility for the decolonizing agenda.

We disagree with a claim that we created a false dichotomy between WILD and WEIRD (Cunha & Thomas) and similarly that WILD is synonymous with non-WEIRD (Mc Gillivray & Carpendale). We did not create such a dichotomy, since WILD includes WEIRD cultural communities, which are contextual, local, and in situ variants. Moreover, we argue that “… dichotomizing WEIRD vs. not-WEIRD does a disservice to large local contextual variations,” citing Chaudhary et al., 2022 (Section 1). When we talk about WILD, we are, by definition, talking about many diverse communities; in other words, WILD subsumes WEIRD.

A more complex issue is the assumption that we created a false dichotomy between distal and proximal parenting (Singh). We actually describe distal and proximal parenting as two distinct, parallel behavioral channels that we find in observational studies of social interactions with small babies, and in the target article, we described some caregiving styles as being “more proximal than distal” (e.g., Section 2.1). Distal and proximal parenting styles have many components that can be present in distinct forms (e.g., in urban German middle-class mothers and subsistence farming Nso mothers, respectively: Keller, Reference Keller2007). Although these parenting styles are based on existing research from us and others, in the references, we refer to papers where we also have described a third channel that is a combination of distal and proximal components. In some parenting styles, components of distal caregiving can be found with components of proximal caregiving; different components can coexist in different styles (Keller, Reference Keller2022). We argued that with more research, more caregiving styles and modes of caregiving are expected to be identified (see Keller, Reference Keller2007; Reference Keller2022).

It is erroneously argued that we used local and in situ as static concepts (Ding & Kong). However, we stress the dynamic nature, for example, when local refers to a complex interplay of ethnotheories and practices of a particular cultural group that necessarily includes change, and in situ refers to contextualized research that also includes the assumption that contexts change; that is, the local context will be variably dynamic across groups, as Ding and Kong highlighted in their consideration of migratory groups. Therefore, small samples are important as case studies (contra Bandini et al.) since the cultural communities to which they belong may be small as well. We encourage increased consideration within research endeavors to more clearly present development within the complex interplay of cultural influences in context, behavior, and representation.

We think that there are inaccuracies in some commentators’ interpretations of the WILD methodology we advocate to increase inclusivity. The one we find most disconcerting is the claim that we advocate for experiments over ethnographic observations (Sanchez de Oliveira & Baggs) and that WILD analyses need to be extended to include experimental experience and replications (Bandini et al.). We wholeheartedly agree with Sanchez de Oliveira and Baggs’ statement that “promoting experiments as the primary method for knowing about development is itself WEIRD.” Moreover, we agree with Borjon and colleagues that “large scale replication efforts are not enough to address the limitations inherent to theories derived from a minority of the world’s children” (contra Chan and colleagues and Bandini and colleagues). We agree with Navarez that extreme caution is required before conducting WEIRD-biased experiments in non-WEIRD cultural communities. In fact, “we advocate beginning by conducting ethnographic studies” (as we explicate in sections 4 and 4.1 of our target article). We highlight our agreement with a comment by Chaudhary and Tuli (advocating for the WILD perspective): “developmental processes must be examined in the ecologies in which they unfold, rather than abstracted into narrowly defined laboratory conditions.” In fact, Keller’s research on attachment is completely ethnographic and qualitative (contra comment by Ding and Kong), and our 5 Steps to Inclusivity strongly emphasize the need for research to be based on in situ and local knowledge gathered through ethnographic methods. Both Bard and Leavens have long used observational methods and/or hybrid ethological/experimental methods in their research with both people and animals. We explicitly argued that experiments are often “theory-driven” and thus are ill-advised until the theories are reconstituted on inclusive foundations. Thus, we are moved to refute the claim by Sanchez de Oliveira and Baggs that we critiqued the theories only on methodological grounds, when we think we clearly critiqued the particularly WEIRD worldviews associated with both developmental theories. We therefore agree with their statement that “these theories are WEIRD in metatheoretical terms.”

We were dismayed by Zhu et al.’s claim that we opt for or recommend (explicitly or implicitly) that Principal Investigators should be primarily Western or that local researchers should be simply in supportive roles. Although we think that Western researchers do currently dominate the scientific discourse (due to historic structural reasons that several of the commentators address), we certainly do not think that they should – this is why we wrote the target article. With our first step to increase inclusivity, moreover, we recommend embedding all investigative endeavors within their cultural communities that are best known by local researchers. Thus, we are not able to endorse the type of practice applauded by Zhu and colleagues of designing an assessment using WEIRD milestones and using it to assess children across global sites. In a paper concerned more with methodology than theory, Bard and Keller (Reference Bard and Keller2024) have argued for greater inclusivity in the entire research process, beginning with the composition of the research team and the conceptualization of the research endeavor, e.g., what topics are relevant for study, what questions need to be answered, what developmental aspects are of interest, and how best to investigate the important phenomena. In our target article, we focus on the critique of current developmental psychology theories, arguing that diverse worldviews must be included and WEIRD bias must be confronted in the entire research process.

R5. Why is there resistance to greater inclusivity in psychological theories?

This crucial question is addressed explicitly by Syed and mentioned by several commentators (Forbes et al.; Kline et al.; MacGillivray & Carpendale; Singh; Chaudhary & Tuli; Ramos; and Vicedo): Syed is most explicit in answering this question: “The reality is that psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD.” This is, in fact, a stunning conclusion (not step zero from our point of view). Several of the commentaries identified some of the hindering factors, which we discuss below.

One obvious dimension seems to be the privilege and power of directing the focus, the narratives, the interpretations, and the conclusions of the research (MacGillivray & Carpendale) that WEIRD researchers traditionally hold and obviously might be interested to maintain. WEIRD researchers usually possess and control the resources in terms of funding, institutional support, and publishing possibilities. Non-WEIRD researchers may also contribute to the continuation of the status quo because of epistemic allyship (Oppong, Reference Oppong2023b). What would be necessary, as Chaudhary and Tuli formulate, is the redistribution of epistemic authority – and obviously there is resistance to changing the system. Besides the general psychological inclination to retain control, changes may be threatening to attaining academic goals (e.g., obtaining tenure, publishing in high-profile journals, and obtaining research funding). These considerations led Kline et al. to advocate for radical decolonization, and they ask: “Who is the theory for in the first place?” Unfortunately, it appears that many conclude theories serve individual careers and do not serve the scientific community nor humanity in general, although this is conflated by universalists’ claims.

A major theme emerging from a plurality of commentaries is that – due to historical, geopolitical inertia – the epistemic center of developmental psychology remains in the Global North, where infrastructure, power, and resources are concentrated (Cunha & Thomas; Singh; Zhu et al.; Ramos; Kline et al.). For example, Cunha and Thomas, citing Oppong (Reference Oppong2023b), advocate for epistemological allyship to combat intellectual extractivism (Anjum & Aziz, Reference Anjum and Aziz2024). Singh lauds aspects of the WILD approach we advocated but notes that the 5 Steps to Inclusivity framework falls short of effective decolonization. Decolonization, she argues, requires substantial structural reform, the investment of resources in Majority World research communities, and leadership by Majority World researchers in research design and theoretical development. Although we propose doable steps toward decolonization of psychological theory, we can only acknowledge that we agree that significant change is necessary in the infrastructure of all psychological research.

Our primary motivation for writing the target article is that we believe a regionally restricted social science is an inherently incomplete social science. We agree with Zhu and colleagues that “[c]apacity building can be a slow process” (about which we comment further, below). Focusing on AT, in particular, Kline and colleagues advocate for shifting epistemic authority of research to non-Western communities, while also promulgating an evolutionary perspective on the situated adaptive challenges.

Another reason that change is slow (or non-existent) concerns the researcher being attached to his or her own cultural worldview, such that the targeting of readers with similar perspectives often goes unnoticed. Vicedo discusses the taken-for-granted WEIRD assumptions that there is an underlying developmental trajectory upon which variability of cultural contexts is added, for example, that secure attachment has developed as an adaptation to the EEA. She views the EEA not as an objective scientific description of the past, but as a historically contingent construct that has been used to advance a specific, culturally laden vision of human nature and family life. By presenting culturally specific practices as biologically determined adaptations to an ancestral environment, the EEA serves an ideological function, making these practices seem natural and inevitable, rather than the result of specific historical and cultural conditions. Two other commentaries raise the issue of evolutionary foundations. Narvaez suggests that having a nest for infants is an evolutionarily preserved characteristic (although “nest” is defined differently for different species/cultural groups). Clay & Crockford suggest that evolutionary perspectives are important, but they fail to provide evidence that our main critiques are inaccurate from an evolutionary perspective. Unfortunately, they appear to merely endorse SIT’s premise, for example, that conversational turn-taking is a core feature of our evolutionary heritage (contrary to the points we make about cultural differences in conversational styles in Section 2.1.1. “Proto-conversations”). In support of this theme, Forbes et al. demand scholars question their own presumptions about the origins of developmental theories and their metaphysical commitment to culture. This reflection would afford a conceptual analysis of the worldviews of the researchers on which the theories are built. Chaudhary and Tuli state “[s]cholars from India and other parts of the Global South have long waited at the margins for our realities to be recognized as legitimate contributions to psychological knowledge” (Tuli, Reference Tuli, Tuli and Negi2025). It also concerns the interpretation of data, which is theory-laden, often confirmatory, that perpetuates bias and epistemic violence (Oppong, Reference Oppong2023a).

The resistance to changing one’s perspectives is described by Syed as psychologists having no interest in questioning one’s own cultural identity and digging up their own hidden cultural-specific assumptions: “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 towards 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.” The discipline that psychology takes as a model is physics. As early as the 1970s Norbert Bischof (Reference Bischof, von Cranach, Foppa, Lepenies and Ploog1978) made programmatic claims that this is a wrong choice and psychology would be better off taking biology as a model primarily because psychological phenomena, like biological systems, are complex, historical, and goal-oriented, unlike the more deterministic, ahistorical, and decontextualized systems often modeled in classical physics. As Syed remarks, psychologists do not have Anthropology envy, but rather they have Physics envy. Qualitative, ethnographic methods are still largely not included in university psychology curricula, while the emphasis is placed on portraying psychology as a real science with “hard” quantitative data collected through theory-driven experiments. Interestingly, the (increasing number of) scholars who choose ethnographic and observational approaches, focusing on local and in situ methodologies and assessments of local meaning systems, feel close to Cultural Anthropology, a branch of science that has long recognized the restrictions, the colonial nature, and the ethical problems of quantitative mainstream psychology.

The relationship between (cultural) anthropology and (cultural) psychology has a history of avoidance. Quantitatively oriented cross-cultural psychologists argued for a long time that cross-cultural psychology should completely ignore cultural anthropology, mainly because of its “soft” (ethnographic) methodology. Poortinga (Reference Poortinga2021), for example, argued that cultural differences are overemphasized at the expense of universality. Yet, recently, efforts are being made both from cultural anthropologists and from (cultural) psychologists to bring the two disciplines closer together. For example, Scheidecker et al. (Reference Scheidecker, Chaudhary, Keller, Mezzenzana and Lancy2023) explicitly state that the main purpose of their paper is to overcome the gap between these disciplines. During the summer of 2025, the University of Muenster hosted an international conference “Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging questions of Mental Health, Education and Well-being” (organized by Kärtner, a psychologist, and Basu, from the fields of social anthropology and ethnology). For future progress in going WILD, closer cooperation of anthropologists and psychologists is mandatory. The cooperation also has important implications for the applied field, as Amici et al. demonstrate a highly consistent trend based in national statistics of WEIRD countries that children from minority cultural backgrounds are disproportionately represented in child protection systems. An important factor for this situation seems to be cultural biases in evaluating parenting practices that differ from one’s own. Another factor that they discuss is that cultural minorities are often facing socioeconomic disadvantages which make them targets of social interventions from governmental youth protection offices.

We agree with Syed that there is enough evidence compiled to demand that psychological theories include diversity, variability, and inclusiveness. Next is to develop strategies to seriously tackle the mechanisms that can eventually initiate change. We agree with Chaudhary and Tuli when they state “… these challenges also invite reflexivity, creativity, and collaboration with communities as co-theorists rather than passive participants.” [para. 7]. From the arguments we find in the comments (e.g., Newson; Kline et al.; Forbes et al.; and our own stance), it is reflexivity that is needed initially: researchers must understand their own theoretical stance and understand any potential bias in their worldviews, methods, and interpretation of results. Furthermore, many commentators reflect their understanding that psychology is always cultural, but that culture may mean substantially different practices, ideas, representations, values, and norms in different contexts. This relates back to the question of whether there is an underlying human nature that applies to all humanity, or substantially different human natures embedded within, and reflective of cultural variations, a question that we believe – contrary to some commentators – requires further empirical inquiry.