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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

🎉 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...

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

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_...

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

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! 🎄✨

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

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...

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

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

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

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.

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

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!

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

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.

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

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.

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

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.

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

🎄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.

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

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!

Continuing this year's countdown to Christmas with Besample's special Advent Calendar of Insights from Beyond the West.

Stay tuned for 24 daily reminders that the world is bigger, more diverse, and far less WEIRD than many behavioral scientists assume.

Today’s insight #2 is especially relevant to behavioral health researchers.

December 2: Asking About Height and Weight in India

If you ask a resident of India their height and weight, you may well hear something like "I'm 5'5" and 60 kg"

Why the mix?

Before independence, India used British imperial units. In the 1960s the country officially adopted the metric system, but in everyday life people still default to feet and inches for height, even though weight is almost always given in kilograms.

This creates an unexpected wrinkle for BMI measurement. Researchers collecting health data in India report that, to obtain accurate self-reports, you often need to convert height into feet and inches while keeping weight in kilograms — the format respondents naturally use.

Thank you, Kaavya I., for the insight! We always learn so much from supporting the exciting projects researchers run on Besample.

Join Besample to take your research beyond the West:
https://lnkd.in/erUC_mPW

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

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

December 1: Household.

Household is a cornerstone unit in Western economics. It is a locus of income, consumption, and decision-making. But in some cultural contexts — for example, in rural Malawi — households often diverge from the idealized Western “household” model. Families can be spatially dispersed, household membership fluid, major decisions follow matrilineal / patrilineal kinship lines.

So in Malawi, kin social networks and resource flows often capture economic reality better than the Western household template. (Ansell & van Blerk, 2004; Meijer, 2015; Sassi, 2023)

Behavioral scientists — let’s open our doors and minds to the wider world. Join Besample to research beyond the West!

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

🚀 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_...

study.besample.app

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Elena Brandt @elena-brandt.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

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...

medium.com

Introducing Besample: A Platform for Behavioral Scientists That Empowers Research Beyond the West

When we launched Besample two years ago, my cofounders and I shared one simple idea: the science of human behavior shouldn’t be built on…

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