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To understand voting behaviour, we must consider voters' emotions and their interaction with electoral arrangements and the complex functions elections serve in democracies. We can then optimize voting via electoral ergonomics — the design of electoral arrangements that consider voters' bodies and minds.
Authors who wish to publish their work with us have the option of a registered report. With this format, acceptance in principle happens before the research outcomes are known. As a result, publication bias is neutralized, as are incentives for practices that undermine the validity of scientific research.
Despite significant investment, contemporary anticorruption efforts have failed to be effective. A new index — the Index of Public Integrity — offers a transparent, evidence-based approach to controlling corruption and measuring progress.
As humans, our decision-making process is biased towards maintaining the status quo, even if an alternative choice has substantial long-term benefits. This cognitive myopia and present bias, when applied to decisions that affect sustainability, could be threatening our future.
Duncan Watts considers whether many branches of social science could benefit from setting research goals aimed at specific and manageable real-world problems. He gives examples and discusses how more solution-oriented social science might work.
By analysing the supermarket purchases of more than 280,000 people over several years, Riefer et al. show that people’s preferences follow their choices, rather than the other way around.
Using whole-genome data for single-nucleotide polymorphism and results from genome-wide association studies, the authors show that people’s preference for pairing with those with similar phenotypic traits has genetic causes and consequences.