If you know Ph.D. students in the behavioral sciences preparing for their dissertation, please encourage them to submit a research idea: study.besample.app/jfe/form/SV_...

My final insight from beyond the West is about Christmas.

You may imagine that Christmas is a Western holiday, with Coca-Cola–style Santa Claus and candy canes all around. But Christmas, just like Christianity, is far more widespread and far less WEIRD than we may think.

Merry Christmas! 🎄✨

A paper by @ashelbyrivers.bsky.social et al., using data collected on Besample, shows that the associations between attachment to parental figures and adult anxiety/depression vary across cultures — challenging the assumption that attachment functions uniformly worldwide: doi.org/10.1177/0265...

In the West, climate change is often framed as a defining moral and political priority. But Western climate-risk models don't work globally: Iyer & Jose (2025), using data collected on Besample, show that in India, material concerns and health matter more than ideology: tinyurl.com/bhnurph4

Besample’s Advent Calendar: Insights from Beyond the West

#17: Divorce

Using divorce as a universal variable quietly embeds Western legal and cultural assumptions into research design — and can distort cross-cultural comparisons.

Join Besample to unlearn WEIRD assumptions and research globally.

Phubbing feels like a universally rude behavior—but it turns out that’s not quite true, as Christiane Büttner (@chrbuettner.bsky.social), Elianne Albath (bsky.app/profile/ealb...) & Rainer Greifeneder show in their paper. I’m proud that this research was conducted using Besample!

Besample's advisor Dr. Sinnott-Armstrong and his team were launching an international study. One of the vignettes read: “You see a girl saying another girl is too ugly to be a varsity cheerleader.” Luckily, a translator caught the issue before data collection — not many cheerleaders beyond the U.S.

The date of birth is a legal pillar in the West, but not universal. In India, 2.7M children under 5 lack birth registration. How do people live when their birth date isn’t recorded? Do they know when they were born? Do they celebrate birthdays? Does it matter at all? There’s no systematic research.

We tend to treat marital status as a married/unmarried binary because the West defaults to monogamy. Family structure shapes household decisions, inheritance norms, and fertility. So, in countries where half of marriages include more than one wife, this binary becomes analytically useless.

🎄Besample’s Advent Calendar with non-Western insights ✨

Gender diversity is not just a recent Western phenomenon: in South Asia, Hijra is a historic third gender category that traditionally held important social roles, like blessing newborns, presiding over ceremonies, and maintaining communities.

Day 2 of our Advent Calendar of Insights from Beyond the West:

In India, people report height in feet/inches but weight in kg — a colonial legacy that still shapes health data.
For accurate BMI, researchers must ask height in feet/inches and weight in kg.

Research beyond the West with Besample!

Starting the countdown to Christmas with Besample's very own Advent Calendar of Insights from Beyond the West — 24 daily reminders that the world is bigger, more diverse, and far less WEIRD than many behavioral scientists assume.

This one was gifted to us by our advisor @michael.muthukrishna.com

🚀 Announcing the Besample Dissertation Grant (N=3,000)

If you’re a Ph.D. student in psychology, economics, sociology, political science, communication, or any related field, this is your chance to get full funding for testing your theory across cultures.

Apply: study.besample.app/jfe/form/SV_...

Hey there! 👋 I’m new to Bluesky, so first things first — a quick intro to the project of my life.

It’s Besample — a data collection platform built to push back against the WEIRD bias that still shapes so much of behavioral science. Let's finally take it beyond the West.

medium.com/@elena-brand...