We’re halfway through the application window for the Besample Dissertation Grant (N=3,000). The applications have been amazing, and we can still take a few more. There’s time to apply before the final deadline on January 15. We’re awarding over $10,000 in research funding to support ambitious behavioral science projects designed to break out of the familiar “WEIRD” bubble. If you know Ph.D. students in the behavioral sciences preparing for their dissertation, please encourage them to submit a research idea: lnkd.in/eDU4mD_6 So far, we’ve received 91 applications from students at leading universities worldwide. The range of questions they’re exploring is genuinely fascinating, including: • how light exposure relates to sleep, mood, and well-being • how capitalism shapes the self across cultures • how people infer social status in everyday life • why some individuals turn to AI rather than humans for emotional support • whether empathy and self-compassion training can reduce ethnocentrism • how mind-wandering helps regulate emotion What’s most exciting is not just the diversity of topics, but the ambition to test these ideas across cultures, beyond the familiar “WEIRD” context. Please consider sharing this opportunity with your network — early-career researchers especially need support in today’s funding environment. 📅 Final deadline: January 15 🚀 Apply here: lnkd.in/eDU4mD_6 Let’s make behavioral science truly global — one dissertation at a time 🎓

Here's your daily insight from beyond the West. This one is #3 on our special Advent Calendar of 2025. December 3: ZIP Codes in Mongolia When researchers sample "representative populations," we usually default to address-based frames, such as ZIP codes, postal registries, or phone numbers. In much of the West, these are reliable tools. But in many parts of the world, they don’t work. Take Mongolia. Roughly 30–40% of its population still practices nomadic or semi-nomadic herding, moving seasonally across vast landscapes of the steppe. (1) These families often have no fixed address, no ZIP code, and no stable administrative location. This means that standard address-based sampling, the foundation of much survey research, will miss large segments of the population before the study even begins. Mongolia isn’t unique. In Niger and Mali, pastoralist tribes migrate seasonally with their herds (2). In parts of Kenya and Tanzania, communities move between grazing areas depending on climate and livestock needs (3). There are other such examples around the world. In all of these contexts, the Western assumption of a stable household address collapses. Sampling frames built around ZIP codes or phone directories systematically underrepresent nomadic populations (which often are the very groups most relevant to development, health, and cross-cultural research). Isn't it fascinating how different life can be outside the Western bubble - and how many of our research assumptions simply don’t travel? Join Besample to break out of the bubble and take your research beyond the West: lnkd.in/eyyK6A6g _______ This is Besample's Advent Calendar of Insights from Beyond the West. Every day, we share one reminder that the world is bigger, richer, and far less WEIRD than most behavioral science assumes. Stay tuned for new revelations! Sources: (1) Hiraga et al., 2020: lnkd.in/eSj-qd6Q (2) Jandreau, C., & Berkes, F. (2016). Continuity and change within the social-ecological and political landscape of the Maasai Mara, Kenya. Pastoralism, 6(1), 1. (3) Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: lnkd.in/eR7-ePsB

Why every study should be a cross-cultural study Spoiler: because for decades, science got something very, very wrong. In this Medium piece, I share (with details and citations) my favorite example of Western bias in behavioral research. It perfectly illustrates how even good science done by smart people - but in just one country - can lead to catastrophic conclusions. And it explains why I’m building Besample. 👉 Read the story: medium.com/@elena-brandt/why… 🌍 If you’re a behavioral researcher who agrees that science is long overdue to be global: researcher.besample.app/?utm…

Turkish people aged 18 to... 2000? (Warning: REALLY NERDY content below! But, behavioral scientists, especially cross-cultural researchers, will probably enjoy it 🤓) So yes, 18 to 2006 years old: that’s what our age distribution in Turkey looked like when our first ~3k respondents from this lovely country joined @Besample_app Instead of a neat almost-normal bell curve human age is supposed to form (fig.1), we suddenly discovered a weird bimodal distribution (fig.2) with two distinct peaks — one around 27, another around 1990. At first, we thought something had gone wrong with the data. Misreports? Script error? We took time to rule out both: the scripts worked fine, and when it comes to misreports, sure, they can occasionally happen, but they never look like this: they would be all over the place, rather than cluster into a single peak. We went to speak with a few local Turkish experts, and the revelation kicked in: apparently, the Turkish word “yaş” means both age and year, so the question "Enter your age" (in years) can easily be read as “Enter your year.” Add to this the fact that Turkish ID cards emphasize the year of birth (not age) — and you can see how some people simply understood the age question as the one about their year of birth. That was where the “bimodal” age distribution was coming from! After triple-checking with local collaborators, we rephrased the question, then re-collected and re-verified the age data — which also worked as an extra consistency check. Lesson learned: even the simplest demographic questions can behave differently across cultures. There are hundreds of these quirks around the world, and finding them is part of the fun (and the mission) of researching beyond the West! At Besample, we see it as our duty not only to help our researchers localize their studies and cross-verify data for consistency and sanity — but also to share anonymized age and gender data for free, so they don't have to collect it from scratch. No need for you make the mistakes we already learnt from 😁 If you're a psychologist, economist, sociologist, political scientist, or another behavioral researcher — sign up to Besample and join the exciting ride: we'll help you collect your first data outside America! lnkd.in/eNSxagdg

My first peer-reviewed article was published today in Psychological Science! Using public data, we show that attitudes and laws about abortion around the world, as well as across 50 U.S. states and 3000+ counties, can be predicted from local mortality risk. Our explanation draws on evolutionary life history theory, suggesting that when mortality is high, it becomes adaptive for human groups to facilitate the "fast" life history mode, marked by more offspring and earlier reproduction. On the opposite, when risk of mortality is low, humans, just like other "slow" animals, can afford later and less abundant reproduction. The data we used here are correlational and cross-sectional, so we cannot really draw causal conclusions, only suggest them. I'm so grateful to my research advisor and co-author Jon Maner who wisely guided me through the review process, helped me use my strengths, was patient to my weaknesses, and eventually got me to have my first pub in a really, really good journal. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/…

We've been shortlisted to pitch at @WebSummit in Lisbon! 😀🎉 Previously, @Besample_app had been selected as one of the startups in the Alpha track with an opportunity to attend the event and exhibit. But pitching is a new milestone: it's super competitive; less than 10% of the attending startups get this opportunity. There will be a dozen relevant investors listening to our 3-min pitch and smashing us afterward :) Wish us luck!