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...
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_...
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.
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.
🎉 Today, we’ve announced the 25 finalists (+5 special awardees) of the Besample Dissertation Grant!
This new wave of Ph.D. researchers is treating cross-cultural research as the default, not an exception.
Meet this incredible group here 👉 besample.app/dissertation...
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.
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
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! 🎄✨
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.
Elena Brandt
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!
