Comment

Russian disinformation exploits social problems in foreign states to undermine people’s trust and breed conspiracy theories. Tackling it is difficult but feasible.

In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a broad swathe of countries have imposed a bevy of sanctions aimed at Vladimir Putin and his supporters. However, the future success of sanctions in curbing Russian aggression is unclear and, despite being targeted, they may harm average Russian individuals and affect prices worldwide.

On 24 February 2022, Russia’s attack on Ukraine shook the world. Among many issues forcibly raised by the war, the question of information manipulation has been particularly important for the public and scholars alike. How did Vladimir Putin’s regime manage to convince the Russian public to support the invasion?

Financial, informational and other constraints lower the adoption of welfare-improving technologies amongst people living in poverty. Field trials have identified effective strategies to facilitate behaviour change. Researchers and policymakers need to apply this knowledge, and form institutional partnerships to implement solutions at scale.

Although large-scale data are increasingly used to study human behaviour, researchers now recognize their limits for producing sound social science. Qualitative research can prevent some of these problems. Such methods can help to understand data quality, inform design and analysis decisions and guide interpretation of results.

Olfaction has profoundly shaped human experience and behaviour from the deep past through to the present day. Advanced biomolecular and ‘omics’ sciences enable more direct insights into past scents, offering new options to explore critical aspects of ancient society and lifeways as well as the historical meanings of smell.

Computational psychiatry holds promise for basic research and clinical practice in safeguarding mental health. In this Comment, we discuss why China needs computational psychiatry, why its development in China will benefit the field globally, and the challenges of promoting computational psychiatry in China and how to tackle them.

Women are underrepresented in prestigious science roles in many countries. This is also true in China, where they are less likely to succeed in election to the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering — for reasons unrelated to scientific merit. Reform of election procedures is needed to foster gender balance.

Open scholarship has transformed research, and introduced a host of new terms in the lexicon of researchers. The ‘Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Teaching’ (FORRT) community presents a crowdsourced glossary of open scholarship terms to facilitate education and effective communication between experts and newcomers.

Combatting climate and ecological change is often framed as the responsibility of either individuals or national governments. Organizations, which are intermediate in size and influence, have enormous potential to deliver effective policies. As an illustration, we consider approaches taken by UK organizations to reduce meat consumption.

Behavioural science can enhance ocean sustainability by providing insights into illegal fishing. Current enforcement criminalizes small-scale fishers and fails to address root causes, letting large-scale illegal fishing off the hook. Efforts to address illegal fishing would benefit from more holistic behavioural research.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy amongst Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups has recently been well observed, and is symptomatic of wider health inequalities. An approach that unites insights from sociology and medicine is the only way to address this pressing issue.

Nudges are tools to achieve behavioural change. To evaluate nudges, it is essential to consider not only their overall welfare effects but also their distributional effects. Some nudges will not help, and might hurt, identifiable groups. More targeted, personalized nudging may be needed to maximize social welfare and promote distributive justice.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theorists have exploited the provisional nature of scientific consensus and the realities of how science is conducted to paint scientists and public health leaders as malign actors.

Reading scientific papers is a necessary part of the research enterprise, but poor writing impedes the flow of information from authors to their audiences. We argue that a return to narrative in scientific writing is not incompatible with rigour and objectivity; it can mitigate information overload and achieve the core purpose of publication: to communicate.

At Wellcome we are committed to finding the next generation of approaches for youth anxiety and depression. Since 2020 we have been learning what works, for whom, and why, by commissioning reviews into the ‘active ingredients’ of successful interventions. Here we share four key calls to action that we hope the mental health science community can take forward.

What is the long-term impact of technological advances on cognitive abilities? We critically examine relevant findings and argue that there is no clear evidence for detrimental lasting effects of digital technology on cognitive abilities. But we also suggest how digital technology may be changing predominant ways of cognition.

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?