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This study of monthly mortality records in the United States during 2001–2016 shows that Black people shouldered a higher mortality burden from PM2.5-related heart disease than non-Hispanic white people despite overall reductions in pollution levels.
Schurer et al. investigate the impact of Melbourne’s 111-day hard lockdown on different domains of adult human life. Results show that there were some significant but small impacts on human life, with greater adverse effects for parents.
Meta-analyses of 22 traits and analyses of 133 traits from UK Biobank find widespread evidence of mate similarity, particularly for social attitudes, education and substance use traits.
The authors use a series of self-finding games—wherein players must identify themselves when there are multiple potential candidates—to show that humans are near optimal at self-orienting, whereas popular reinforcement learning algorithms are not.
Bullying comes in many forms, including when subordinates bully a manager. Sara Branch argues that workplaces should implement policies to combat all types of bullying.
Anglo-Saxon conventions in handling author names in the academy negatively affect scholars around the world. Academia can and must take steps to change this, writes Victoria Guazzelli Williamson.
Climate change and rising temperatures are expected to increase food insecurity globally. An analysis of 150 countries shows that heat increases food insecurity within days of exposure. Mediation analyses indicate this may be linked to heat-related effects on the capability to earn income and afford food. Low-income areas and areas with prevalent agricultural or vulnerable employment are most affected.
Despite widespread concerns that social media exacerbate incivility and partisan polarization, few solutions to address this issue have been identified. We developed a mobile chat platform to study how varying levels of anonymity shape conversations about politics. In contrast to the popular wisdom, we find that carefully structured anonymous online conversations can reduce polarization.
Heat is associated with higher household food insecurity within days of exposure across 150 countries as households. This is mediated by income. Regions with lower incomes and more agricultural or precarious employment are most affected.
Despite widespread concern that social media exacerbates incivility and partisan polarization, few solutions have been identified. In contrast to the popular wisdom, Combs et al. find that anonymous online conversations can reduce polarization.
‘Metacognition’ refers to thinking about thinking, and its function in collective human behaviour remains largely unknown. Using a multiplayer online game and agent-based modelling, Hawkins et al. found distinctive patterns of collective intelligence that only emerge when using metacognitive social inference skills.
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others’ successes. Hawkins et al. use a large-scale collective sensing paradigm to test how individual social inference abilities shape the emergent behaviour of human groups.
Giron et al. provide empirical evidence that human development has much in common with the algorithm of ‘stochastic optimization’ widely used in machine learning, resolving ambiguities around commonly used analogies in developmental psychology.
Progress in the burgeoning field of misinformation research requires some degree of consensus about what constitutes an effective intervention to combat misinformation. We differentiate between research designs that are used to evaluate interventions and recommend one that measures how well people discern between true and false content.
This meta-analysis of the relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behaviour finds that the relationship varies from being negative to positive, but, on average, higher economic inequality is associated with lower prosocial behaviour.
Christia et al. evaluate the delivery of content to empower women exposed to violence amid COVID-19. The recipients exhibited no credible evidence of a shift in attitudes but increased their knowledge and hypothetical and reported use of resources.
Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, as it enables us to flexibly solve new problems without extensive practice. By using a wide range of tests, we demonstrate that GPT-3, a large-scale artificial intelligence language model, is capable of solving difficult analogy problems at a level comparable to human performance.