Commentary on the beyond WEIRD special issue: The importance of open research practices to empirical research in the evolutionary social sciences

Abstract

The importance of open research practices to the evolutionary social sciences has been underscored of late (e.g. Beheim 2016; Kavanagh and Kapitány 2021). The "Beyond WEIRD" special issue has exemplary demonstrations of several practices, including, but not limited to, data archiving, code sharing, and open materials. Here, I focus on these three open research practices. I reiterate their benefits for comparative cross-cultural research in the evolutionary social sciences. I also highlight some of the challenges researchers might face in their implementation, and provide pointers to possible solutions. Finally, I list elements of open research that merit greater discussion in this area of research. For brevity, the focus here is on experimental work, although open research practices apply to other empirically based cross-cultural research more broadly.First, how common is the implementation of open research practices in the evolutionary social sciences? An indication is provided by a recent survey of the social learning literature, including cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology, conducted by Minocher et al. (2020). The authors were able to reproduce one in four results from 1955 to 2018, i.e. to re-derive the results using the same data and methods as in the original research. Low reproducibility was primarily due to unavailable, incomplete, or ambiguous data, as well as unclear analytic pipelines, an issue compounded by a lack of scripting in a statistical language such as R. However, estimated reproducibility was around 70% for 2018. It appears that open research practices are increasingly being adopted -a shift attributable to changes in academic norms, journal requirements, and technological capabilities.There are several advantages to open data, code, and materials (Towse et al. 2020). Innovation is promoted through the re-use of data and code. Open practices provide opportunities for collaboration; minimally, they allow researchers not part of large research programmes to integrate work. Generally, openness ensures the transparency and credibility of the scientific record. As such, these practices should be adopted, unless opting out can be justified.Open data can facilitate cross-cultural comparisons and meta-analyses, and can help situate a primary study within the broader literature. With researchers encouraged to expand samples beyond students from "WEIRD" contexts, MTurkers, and individuals from "small-scale societies", public data will allow comparison across populations (Apicella and Barrett 2016;Milfont and Klein 2018). Townsend et al. (2020) is an illustration of the type of cross-cultural research that could draw upon open data. The authors demonstrated that sharing in a dictator game