Is it weird in here and does comparative cognition suffer from main-character syndrome?

Comparative cognition can make itself more relevant to those who care largely (or entirely) about humans by making itself less WEIRD and less focused on humans. That feels nonintuitive, I know, but psychology has long wanted to find itself at the table with the so-called "hard" sciences, and those sciences have already addressed their WEIRDness largely because they have not wanted humans to be the main character in their story. This cannot be the goal for psychological science to take humans out of it entirely, or should it be. However, there is a fertile middle ground between humans always being the central character and instead sometimes being a "supporting" character in proper comparative perspective or perhaps in some cases not being a character at all (e.g., for some evolutionary questions in which humans are too distantly related to be relevant to the study of certain phylogenetic or mechanistic questions of closely related species). This approach can facilitate greater appreciation for the need to study cognition across cultures and across species (as well as other potential sentient entities such as those emerging in artificial intelligence). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).