Research articles

Kvarven, Strømland and Johannesson compare meta-analyses to multiple-laboratory replication projects and find that meta-analyses overestimate effect sizes by a factor of almost three. Commonly used methods of adjusting for publication bias do not substantively improve results.

Kristal and Whillans conducted five field experiments (n = 68,915) designed to increase sustainable commuting using standard behavioural science tools. The interventions’ failures highlight the difficulty of changing commuter behaviour using this approach.

The media can shape the collective memory of a nation. A new study reports that the organization of memory traces for World War II events in the brain follows the same structure as the collective memory schema derived from television coverage.

Van de Vliert finds that differentiation between ingroups and outgroups co-varies with latitude, but not longitude. Differentiation is highest closer to the equator, and this pattern may be explained by ecological conditions in tropical regions.

Earle and Hodson find that discrimination perceptions differ from reported discrimination experiences, and that declines in anti-black discrimination have not coincided with increases in anti-white discrimination.

Subtle economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces even when perceivers are warned that such cues are non-informative or are instructed and incentivized to ignore them. This bias puts low-income individuals at a disadvantage.

Scholars have long disagreed about how best to achieve stable national democracy. Ruck et al. show that democratization follows from an intergenerational build-up of democratic cultural values, without which democracy is liable to fail.

Efferson et al. use models to examine the reversal of traditions such as female genital cutting. They find that interventions should avoid targeting agents amenable to change and should disrupt any link between cultural identity and traditional practice.

Bellmund et al. use immersive virtual reality combined with successor representation modelling to show that environmental geometry distorts human spatial memory consistent with deformations of grid-cell firing patterns in navigating rodents.

Lees and Cikara show a negativity bias in group meta-perceptions—how we believe ‘they’ see ‘our’ behaviour—demonstrate how such inaccurate, pessimistic beliefs exacerbate intergroup conflict; and they provide an avenue for reducing the negative effects of inaccuracy.

Schad et al. find that, during Pavlovian conditioning, model-free striatal reward prediction errors are present in a group of sign-tracking humans, while goal-tracking humans show learning signals from a model-based system instead.

All anxiety disorders are characterized by sleep disruption. Ben Simon et al. develop a neural framework of sleep-loss-induced anxiety, one that emphasizes NREM sleep as a therapeutic target for anxiety amelioration.

Recent accounts of overconfidence suggest it helps individuals reach higher status in groups by making them seem more competent. Lyons et al. show that lobbyists with higher social status (for example, higher income) are more likely to overrate their own success.

When an automated car harms someone, who is blamed by those who hear about it? Over five studies, Awad et al. find that drivers are blamed more than their automated cars when both make mistakes.

How similar are the behavioural profiles of people with obesity, uncontrolled eating, and addiction? In a meta-analysis of facet-based phenotype profiles, Vainik et al. find that uncontrolled eating and addiction have more similarities than obesity and addiction.

Using physician stress as a model stressor, Fang et al. demonstrate that the polygenic risk score for major depressive disorder is a stronger predictor of depression under stress than under baseline conditions and may be particularly useful for identifying resilience.

Abdellaoui et al. examine the geographic distribution of human DNA differences in Great Britain, finding that the geographic distribution of polygenic scores for educational attainment and other complex traits resembles the geographic distribution of economic differences.

Here we demonstrate that patients’ pain experiences are directly modulated by providers’ expectations of treatment outcomes in a simulated clinical interaction, providing evidence of a socially transmitted placebo effect.

Using billions of words of digitized historical text, Hills et al. develop and validate a measure of national subjective wellbeing, the National Valence Index, going back 200 years.

Bridgers et al. combine computational modelling and developmental experiments to show that even young children reason about others’ costs and rewards to make utility-maximizing decisions about what to teach and what to let learners discover on their own.