Psychological science has long relied on research conducted with a narrow subset of the world’s population, primarily those who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD), a term that has, since its first publication (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, Reference Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan2010), rapidly entered the vocabulary of the social sciences. WEIRD now serves as a widely recognized shorthand. The popularity of the term reflects the imbalance between sampled populations and broad generalizations: while WEIRD populations represent only a small fraction of humanity, they have often been treated as the standard for cognition, emotion, and behaviour, raising important questions of representativeness and generalizability.

In a similarly evocative turn, Newson et al. (Reference Newson, Buhrmester, Xygalatas and Whitehouse2020) propose WILD psychology, an approach that is Worldwide, In Situ, Local, and Diverse. WILD research encourages psychologists to study individuals in their everyday contexts, attend to cultural variation, and consider the ecological conditions that shape thought and behaviour. By emphasizing processes as they unfold in real-world settings, WILD psychology foregrounds ecological validity and moves beyond laboratory constraints and homogeneous subject pools. WILD psychology is particularly consonant with the perspectives of cultural psychology (Valsiner, Reference Valsiner2021). Similarly, cultural psychology foregrounds the uniqueness of individuals, the uncertainty and variability of human experience, and the centrality of everyday contexts and meaning-making processes between person and culture using dynamic process methodology. This alignment underscores how expanding psychology beyond WEIRD populations is not only a methodological imperative but also a theoretical and epistemological one, connecting contemporary debates with the discipline’s foundational vision (Tuli & Chaudhary, Reference Tuli and Chaudhary2025).

Bard, Keller, and Leavens illustrate the potential of this approach in developmental science. Their reappraisal of attachment theory reframes caregiving not as a singular evolutionary adaptation but as a flexible suite of relational strategies shaped by ecological, cultural, and relational imperatives. Rather than evaluating behaviour against WEIRD-centric expectations of “secure” or “insecure” attachment, they propose understanding caregiving and attachment as contextually adaptive, highlighting resilience, autonomy, and group coherence within diverse caregiving ecologies. Ethnographic research from different parts of the world demonstrates the need to expand the attachment theory to include feeding and body-centred caregiving as central to the formation of infant relationships (Funk et al., Reference Funk, Scheidecker, Chapin, Schmidt, Ouardani and Chaudhary2023).

The authors also address Tomasello’s Shared Intentionality Theory (SIT) which outlines a purportedly uniquely human developmental pathway grounded in communication, cultural learning, and cooperation (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2019). While SIT frames these capacities as universal, the authors highlight potential biases, questioning whether the theory sufficiently accounts for cultural diversity in human social cognition. Together, these critiques reinforce the broader shift from WEIRD to WILD perspectives: developmental processes must be examined in the ecologies in which they unfold, rather than abstracted into narrowly defined laboratory conditions.

A further example of why broadening perspective matters comes from research on cultures of caregiving. The model, Care of Many by Many (Chaudhary, Tuli, & Pillai, Reference Chaudhary, Tuli and Pillai2025; Keller & Chaudhary, Reference Keller, Chaudhary, Keller and Bard2017), argues that multigenerational and multi-caregiver involvement is significant for community living since roles, relationships, and responsibilities, like the care of children, are shared and collaborative. Through much of human history, care has unfolded in extended kin networks and community settings, where responsibilities are shared, resilience is built through redundancy, and no single caregiver bears the full weight of developmental outcomes. By contrast, the single-caregiver model so often assumed in WEIRD psychology – whether in attachment theory or parenting studies – is not only atypical but also costly and burdensome, especially for mothers. As Brooks (Reference Brooks2020) has noted in The Atlantic, the nuclear family is a fragile historical anomaly. Reframing caregiving as distributed rather than individualized underscores how profoundly psychology must reorient its assumptions in the move from WEIRD to WILD.

For many of us working in developmental and cultural psychology outside the North Atlantic world, this debate carries an additional resonance. Scholars 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). Too often, we have been compelled into what has been called “Northern ventriloquism” (Naidu, Reference Naidu2021) – speaking in categories that are not ours, performing relevance through borrowed vocabularies. The relief of the WILD turn is that it opens space for epistemologies of the South (Santos, Reference Santos2014), which affirm uniqueness, uncertainty, and meaning-making in everyday life. What is at stake is not just more inclusive sampling but a redistribution of epistemic authority: the recognition that the South does not merely supply “data” for Northern theories but offers theoretical insight of its own. The authors of this article (Bard et al.,) illustrate the lack of inclusivity in developmental science, demonstrating that this is not “just a bias” (sect. 5, para. 4), but a conscious mindset that excludes people living outside of a narrow section of humanity. The examples from Attachment theory and Joint Attention illustrate a much larger, pervasive problem in the discipline that could only be achieved by “embracing the knowledge that humans are basically different and explicitly acknowledging that ‘different’ is not ‘deficient’” (sect. 5, para. 4).

Adopting WILD principles is not without challenges. Research in diverse contexts can be logistically demanding, ethically complex, and methodologically nuanced. Comparability across cultures requires careful design, attention to translation, consent, and interpretation, and openness to methodological innovation. Yet these challenges also invite reflexivity, creativity, and collaboration with communities as co-theorists rather than passive participants.

Ultimately, WILD psychology is more than a corrective to WEIRD bias – it is a vision for a more inclusive, representative discipline. By embracing context, diversity, and lived experience, psychological science can move closer to capturing the multiplicity of human worlds, producing knowledge that speaks not to “the child” or “the human” in the abstract, but to the many varied realities in which people live.