When viewing the current status of psychology in terms of membership in international psychological associations, it appears that large parts of the world are grossly underrepresented, with only 4 psychologists per million in Asia and Africa compared to 424 per million in North America. Having originated in Western Europe and North America in the second half of the 19th century, psychology has been linked to the problems of Western industrialization and has spread with colonization. Seen not only as an ideological export to the Third World, psychology has been criticized for its use as a social instrument intended to focus on and preserve the status of the elite. The lack of a comparatively large number of new results from the research of colleagues in developing countries has led Western psychologists to pay little attention to their work. Western psychologists have been criticized for psychological generalizations that have neither cross-cultural or cross-social validity. In order to overcome this ethnocentrism, psychologists need to (1) take a closer look at the indigenous research of Third World psychologists, (2) develop advice in terms of social psychology and applied developmental psychology for dealing with Third World population problems, (3) develop research on psycho-cultural shock resulting from the disintegration of traditional social structures increasingly faced by developing countries, and (4) develop indigenous techniques and procedures for overcoming the psychological effects of massive modernization on developing nations. (LH)