Introduction to world psychology

In trying to draw an international picture of psychology we have had some difficulty in accessing up to date statistics.

The current size of the discipline
Sloan et al (2006) wrote the following  The United States and Canada have spawned at least five thousand universities, all of which offer some form of education in scientific psychology. .... Over half a million individuals in these two countries have been trained to perform some sort of psychologically-informed practice such as assessment, testing, counseling, program evaluation, training, personnel selection, coaching, and so forth in either institutional settings or in private practice

For the first time the number of psychologists in the rest of the world exceeds those in the USA.

On this basis we estimate that there are about one million graduate psychologists in the world, who have been trained in one of 10,000 universities.

Of these only a proportion belong to the national psychological societies.

If we take the members of the International Union of Psychological Science we can draw up the following table by country.

Future projections for the size of the discipline
In terms of future projections it is difficult to predict the growth of the discipline. and some work needs to be done here to give us some realistic idea. Certainly if India and Chinia develop their interest then we could easily see a doubling of graduate numbers over the next 10 years.

Towards an international psychology
A great proportion of psychology experiments have been conducted on white, undergraduate psychologists, often in English speaking countries such as the US or UK. When trying to determine the psychology of human beings, we must not fall into the trap of ethnocentrism; that is, assuming that psychological tendancies of one race or culture can be extrapolated to apply to the people of the rest of the world.

Books

 * Pawlik, K. & Rosenzweig,M.(2000). International Handbook of Psychological Science. Sage Press.
 * M.R. Rosenzweig (Ed.) (1992). International psychological science, Progress, problems, and prospects. Washington, D,C.: American Psychological Association.
 * Stevens,M.J. and  Wedding,D.(2006)(Eds).Psychology: IUPsyS Global Resource, Edition 2006,   Details