Inconvenience is inevitable in building a better psychology: commentary on Sherman (2024)

Psychological science advances on two complementary fronts: discovery and generalization. Sherman rightly defends the value of convenience samples for the former. However, his article omits how generalization is necessary for psychological science as a whole, and how considerations of generalization must shape our interpretation of empirical results — even those conducted without an aim to produce generalizable conclusions. In this commentary, we 1) affirm the importance of convenience samples as a tool, 2) discuss how generalization is key to psychological science as a whole, and plays a role even in interpreting studies not intended to generalize across groups, and 3) illustrate the feasibility of broad generalization, including through the use of theoretical frameworks and ‘inconvenient’ cross-cultural data sets.