Verified by 
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
"The curse is upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalot
Alfred Tennyson's (1809-1892) poem THE LADY OF SHALOT is often interpreted as symbolic of the isolated life of the artist. The Lady of Shalot sees the world through a mirror, and is destroyed when she looks at the world directly. Academic psychologists seem to imagine they suffer a similar curse, because they are more and more determined to see the world only through a mirror, which gives them images constructed on the basis of the lives of undergraduate students.
The vast majority of psychological research is still being conducted using undergradaute students as subjects. This is despite the fact that undergraduate students are not a good representative of the seven billion people who now inhabit the earth.
The near exclusive reliance on undergraduate students in psychologial research has been facilitated by a requirement being adopted at many institutes of higher education: that undergraduate students in psychology courses serve as subjects in psychological research. Ironically, this requirement is being implemented in the name of 'scientific training', whereas the real reason for this requirement is that graduate students and faculty find it more convenient to have larger undergraduate subject pools available - for free.
But surely the spread of cross-cultural research will put a stop to this increased reliance on undergraduates in psychological research? This is a reasonable expectation, but a wrong one. In practice, as Naomi Lee and I found in a review (Moghaddam & Lee, 2006), the number of cross-cultural studies using undergraduate subjects has increased, not decreased. This is because it is now routine for some researchers to email questionnaires and other research instruments to their contacts in universities around the world, ask for the instruments to be distributed to classes in different countries, and publish 'multi-nation' studies without ever having left their offices! I routinely receive requests from such researchers carrying out 'multi-nation studies' to distrubute emailed questionnaires to my classes.
The mirror acacemic psychologists are holding up is giving a detailed picture of the thoughts and actions of undergraduate students, mostly those taking psychology courses and mostly living in Western societies.
When will we have the courage to look away from this mirror?
Moghaddam, F. M. & Lee. N. (2006). Double reification: The processs of universalizing psychology in the three worlds. In A Brock (Ed.)....This paper can be found on my website: fathalimoghaddam.com
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