Going #BeyondWEIRD in HBES’s Inaugural Roundtable Seminar Series

By Nicole Barbaro

 

HBES hosted the inaugural Roundtable Seminar Series event on October 29 with over 130 members in live attendance. The new event series, organized by HBES volunteers Kristopher Smith, Courtney Crosby, and Paul Deutchman, featured a panel of researchers who specialize in cross-cultural research to discuss the importance of going beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) in evolutionary social science research. The event topic corresponds with the September special issue of HBES’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior, also by the title, Beyond WEIRD.

Panelists Dr. Coren Apicella, Dr. Dorsa Amir, Dr. Clark Barrett, Dr. Joseph Henrich, and Dr. Brooke Scelza discussed issues of population diversity in the evolutionary social sciences. Lively discussion centered around why population diversity matters, what progress has been made in the past decade since Henrich’s influential Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper was published, what steps researchers can take to study a broader range of human variation, and why diversity of researchers’ background matter as much as the diversity of our research samples.

 

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjgnOtgJ_Gc[/embedyt]

 

The Roundtable Seminar Series will be held regularly throughout the year, approximately every 1 – 2 months. HBES members receive the exclusive perk of being able to watch the event live, engage in chat with other attendees, and ask the panelists questions. Following each event, the recording of the event will be available for anyone to view on the HBES Roundtable Series YouTube channel.

 

The second event in the Roundtable Series will be held on Tuesday, November 17 at 12 pm -1:15 pm EST, with the topic of discussion centered on Life History Theory as Applied to Inter-Individual Variation, corresponding with the upcoming special issue of HBES’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. The conversation will include panelists Dr. Marco Del Giudice, Dr. Keelah Williams, Dr. Daniel Nettle, and Dr. Rebecca Sear, moderated by Dr. Willem Frankenhuis.

 

Thank you to all who made the first event a great success, and we look forward to seeing you all on November 17!