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Societal altruism is changing. Increased awareness and use of online social media is providing new ways of inspiring collective action and support for critical societal challenges. What makes some social causes go viral while others never seem to take off?
The view of drug use and drug addiction as a brain disease serves to perpetuate unrealistic, costly, and discriminatory drug policies, argues Carl L. Hart.
‘Stop and test’ assessments do not rigorously evaluate a student's understanding of a topic. Artificial intelligence-based assessment provides constant feedback to teachers, students and parents about how the student learns, the support they need and the progress they are making towards their learning goals.
Immunization against vaccine-preventable diseases not only protects the individual but also has a social benefit. A study now shows that communicating this effect, known as herd immunity, can have a substantial impact on a person's inclination to vaccinate, an insight that could be leveraged in vaccine advocacy.
Whether ritual behaviour reliably predicts cooperation is hotly debated. A study evaluating religion and social links among all adult residents of two South Indian villages finds that religious practice clearly predicts reciprocal cooperative ties. Rigorous quantitative field studies like this are a powerful way to resolve long-standing debates.
Data obtained over twelve months from a large cohort of stroke patients shows that most recovery occurs within three months and is predicted by the severity of the initial deficit and patients’ education level.
Chen et al. construct a model of the neural bases of semantic representation that unifies domain-specific (distinct systems represent different kinds of things) and domain-general (knowledge for all kinds is encoded in a single network) accounts.
Takagi and colleagues present a model of how human pairs learn movements through touch. Participants learn in the same way when the model is applied to a robotic partner. This is important for the development of physical assistance robotics.
Betsch and colleagues show that vaccination willingness is higher in cultures that focus on collective benefits. For cultures that lack this prosocial cultural inclination, communicating the concept of herd immunity improves willingness to vaccinate.
Using a detailed ethnographic dataset from rural India, Power finds that the outwardly religious engage in more prosocial acts, are perceived as more prosocial by others in their social network and leverage greater social support as a result.
When given time to deliberate in an economic game, individuals become less cooperative. Grossmann and colleagues show that players directed toward a third-person perspective reorientate from selfish to common goals and maintain cooperation.
