Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Recent research has shown that people can perceive the shape of objects, even when the objects are not directly perceptible (for instance, when draped in cloth). These findings present a challenge to existing theories of shape perception, which are based on the use of surface cues alone. Yildirim et al. present a computational model of three-dimensional shape perception that integrates intuitive physics and analysis-by-synthesis to explain how shape can be inferred both when surface object cues are available and when they are not (as in cloth draping).
Our understanding of the human past is changing rapidly, and this does not come from new evidence alone. We are seeing an increasing diversity of perspectives among archaeologists, and they are asking new and important questions. But the field still has a long way to go.
Positionality statements describe how researcher identities shape research processes. We must consider how these statements can enact harm upon marginalized researchers.
Political polarization leads to distrust. In universities, this can lead to conflict or silence in classes and hinder learning and engagement. Faculty members and leaders can promote depolarization by encouraging constructive dialogue in and out of class, cultivating viewpoint diversity within boundaries and expanding civic spaces.
Most scientific prizes and medals are named after men, and most of these are also awarded to men. The very few awards named after women or not named after a person at all are more frequently awarded to women, although parity between the gender of recipients is still not achieved. We call on the scientific community to rethink the naming of academic awards, medals and prizes, their nomination and selection criteria, and to diversify awarding committees and procedures to ensure greater inclusivity.
The use of typological conceptions of race in science is not based in evidence. A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, USA clarifies how human populations should be described in genetics and genomics research. It makes twelve recommendations that are highly relevant to behavioural genetics.
Biobanks have emerged as valuable resources for studying behavioural and social genomics, but are not representative of global populations. Thus, current research findings do not generalize, and exacerbate knowledge and health inequalities. We call on researchers, publishers and funders to address barriers to biobank diversity.
Using a large dataset of individuals from Early Neolithic Europe, we analysed DNA, diet and pathology to determine which factors most affected skeletal height. We found that the male–female height differences in north-central Europe were exceptionally large, and that the short stature of female individuals in this region possibly reflects a cultural preference to support male individuals. By contrast, in the Mediterranean, it is male individuals who were short, probably as a consequence of environmental stress.
Whether conservatives or liberals have higher sensitivity towards underrepresentation depends on the target of the judgement: conservatives are shown to have higher thresholds than liberals for indicating bias against traditionally nondominant groups, whereas liberals have higher bias thresholds regarding dominant groups. However, such relationships weaken when the targets of bias are unknown or ideologically irrelevant to the observer, which emphasizes the context-dependency of such bias judgements.
The authors address the central criticism of latent variable models in behavioural science, which is that a wide range of causal models may account for the observed data (the factor indeterminacy problem). They review how researchers have recently started using genome-wide data to provide a source of additional information to help to overcome the factor indeterminacy problem by decomposing the genome into a set of uncorrelated units.
Aguinis et al. review the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the individual level of analysis and propose a framework for organizing research around three categories: CSR perceptions, CSR attitudes and CSR actions.
Conservatives show higher bias thresholds towards underrepresentation of non-dominant groups, while liberals do for dominant ones. This relationship weakens if bias targets are unknown or irrelevant, highlighting context-dependency in bias judgements.
Evidence from genetics, skeletal remains and dietary isotopes indicates that sex-specific height disparities in Early Neolithic Europe can be linked to culture, more than environment or genetics. This suggests that a cultural preference for males may have had biological effects 7,000 yr ago.
de Vries et al. map civic opportunity across America, demonstrating that it is highly correlated with pro-social community behaviours, but is unequally distributed, and underrepresented in public dialogue—suggesting it may warrant greater attention.
The authors construct a model that captures both health and economic aspects of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, and uncover trade-offs between epidemic and economic outcomes both when individuals change their behaviour due to fear of infection and when non-pharmaceutical interventions are imposed.
The authors linked data from non-European Union migrants and resettled refugees to the national COVID-19 vaccination dataset in England, demonstrating disparities in vaccination timing and coverage.
Effective government partly depends on effective communications to citizens. Over six studies in three different policy contexts, Linos et al. identify a counter-intuitive formality effect: citizens are more likely to respond to formal government communications than informal ones.
Four labs discovered and replicated 16 novel findings with practices such as preregistration, large sample sizes and replication fidelity. Their findings suggest that with best practices, high replicability is achievable.
Yildirim et al. present a computational model of shape perception that integrates intuitive physics to explain how shape can be inferred from the deformations it causes to other objects.
Using eye-tracking and representational geometry analyses, Linde-Domingo and Spitzer find that, even when requested to maintain fixation, humans produce involuntary miniature gaze patterns that encode visuospatial information and change over time to reflect the underlying mental process.
Mumford et al. examine how response time differences can lead to confounds in functional MRI analyses, and they propose a new time-series model to account for response time effects.
The authors conducted a genome-wide meta-analysis on anxiety disorders and identified new risk loci, as well as variants and genes that may be causal. This provides insights into the genetic architecture of anxiety disorders and potential therapeutic targets.
Spampatti et al. examined the efficacy of six psychological inoculation strategies and discovered that these strategies had close to no protective effects against climate disinformation across 12 different countries.