Research articles

Pool and colleagues show that Pavlovian conditioning involves learning of different classes of responses: some flexibly adapt to changes in outcome value, whereas others persist even when the outcome is no longer valuable for the individual.

Evacuees who intermarry and remain in the host society gain socioeconomic benefits but suffer reduced fertility. This suggests that integration involves trade-offs between within-group ‘bonding’ social networks and between-group ‘bridging’ networks

Schaffnit et al. present data indicating that early marriage (<18 years of age) may serve both parents’ and daughters’ strategic interests in rural Tanzania. This conclusion is in contrast to common assumptions of the global ‘end child marriage’ movement.

What conditions produce a willingness to sacrifice our own self-interest for others? McGrath and Gerber find that collaboration increases willingness to sacrifice, distinct from considerations of accountability, in-group favouritism or disparity.

How good are people at choosing between exploration and exploitation? In a task that captures the essence of such decisions, Song et al. found systematic deviations from optimality that were associated with the sequence of decisions participants can make.

Bocanegra and colleagues present a new variation of the Raven intelligence test, an established measure of cognitive function; better performance on this new version, which allows problem-solving to be externalized, is associated with students’ success in exams.

Jackson and colleagues apply methods from computational linguistics to show that American norms grew looser from 1800 to 2000. Looser American norms over time were positively associated with societal creativity but negatively associated with order.

Data from three diverse post-conflict societies show that individuals with greater war exposure, several years later, were more likely to participate in religious groups and rituals. This reveals a link from violent conflict to religiosity.

Forscher et al. probe whether grant reviewers discriminate on the basis of principal investigator race or gender. In an experiment involving 412 active scientists, the authors find no evidence of pragmatically important bias.

A daily, city-level happiness metric constructed from the sentiment expressed in 210 million tweets on Sina Weibo from 144 cities shows that high levels of air pollution significantly reduce Chinese urbanites’ expressed happiness on social media.

Using data from 765 million online music plays chosen by 1 million individuals in 51 countries, Park et al. reveal diurnal and seasonal affective rhythms in musical intensity that are consistent across diverse cultures and demographic groups. They also report differences in baseline preferences for musical intensity across cultures and ages.

An individual’s social ties contain up to 95% of the potential predictive accuracy achievable about that individual. In principle, a social platform may therefore profile an individual from their ties only, without access to their data.

When do groups exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ vs maladaptive ‘herding’? Toyokawa et al. use modelling and experimentation to show that crowd intelligence versus herding can be predicted on the basis of the task and the social learning strategies used.

Askelund et al. show that remembering more specific positive life experiences is associated with fewer negative self-related thoughts and lower levels of stress hormones in a study of 427 adolescents at risk for depression.

This scoping review identified, summarized and critiqued 15 ontologies related to human behaviour change. The review finds that no existing ontology covers the breadth of human behaviour change and identifies the need for an intervention ontology.

Why do we continue processing external events during sleep, yet remain unresponsive? Legendre et al. use electroencephalography to show that sleepers enter a ‘standby mode’, continuing to track relevant signals but doing so transiently.

Combining behavioural modelling with functional and structural brain connectivity, Karlaftis et al. show that individuals learn the structure of variable environments by employing alternate decision strategies that engage distinct brain networks.

Adolescents regularly use digital technology, but its impact on their psychological well-being is unclear. Here, the authors examine three large datasets and find only a small negative association: digital technology use explains at most 0.4% of well-being.

In the United States, France and Germany, as peoples’ opposition to genetically modified (GM) foods becomes more extreme, their self-rated understanding of genetic modification increases, but objectively, their knowledge of the science behind genetic modification tends to be poorer.

Nearby small objects appear larger than distal large objects, reflecting a dissociation between perceived and actual object size. Collegio et al. show that inferences of true object size scale spatial attention to objects.