Articles

Scientists fear that systemic incentives lead to poor science. Stewart and Plotkin use modelling to show how a scientific process emphasizing the use of theory to select hypotheses can allow good science to thrive in the face of pressure to publish.

In a pre-registered meta-analysis, Parry et al. find that, when self-reported media use is compared with digital logs of media use, subjective judgements are often inaccurate. This suggests caution when self-reports are used to test associations between media use and other outcomes.

Trust in science is important for vaccine confidence, and this is true for countries as well as individuals. Sturgis et al. find that confidence in vaccination is higher in countries where people agree that scientists are trustworthy.

Two eye-tracking experiments revealed that adolescents and older adults look less at social stimuli during a face-to-face conversation and while navigating the real world compared with young adults, which may affect the success of their social interactions.

Schmid et al. present a unified framework for direct and indirect reciprocity, exploring how people choose to cooperate on the basis of either their direct experience with others (direct reciprocity) or the others’ general reputation (indirect reciprocity).

Storrs et al. train unsupervised generative neural networks on glossy surfaces and show how gloss perception in humans may emerge in an unsupervised fashion from learning to model statistical structure.

Why does cooperation decline? Burton-Chellew and West compare data from 237 public goods games and find that cooperation declines faster when learning is easier.

The most parsimonious network of routes taken by the first people navigating Sahul emerge from landscape-based rules, which can also be applied to other peopling events, to quantify the likely patterns of the peopling of Earth.

Merkley and Loewen find that anti-intellectualism (distrust in experts and intellectuals) is linked to COVID-19 (mis)perceptions, compliance with public health directives and information search using survey and experimental data from Canada.

Ruggeri et al. tested perceptions of opposing political party members in 10,207 participants from 26 countries. Results show that beliefs about others are overly negative but could be more realistic with transparency about actual group beliefs.

Using relationship data for over 5,000 hospital employees inferred from 2 years of workplace cafeteria sales data, Levy et al. found significant associations in the healthfulness of food purchases between socially connected employees.

This meta-analysis of 419 randomized controlled trials found that various types of psychological interventions could improve mental wellbeing in clinical and non-clinical populations. Effect sizes tended to be small to moderate and were influenced by various moderators.

Overt and covert attention are often considered to be linked. By studying presaccadic attention’s effects on visual performance, Li et al. show that the computations underlying overt presaccadic attention are different from those of covert attention.

Thorp et al. use symptom-level genetic modelling to identify 61 and 73 genomic loci associated with depression and anxiety, respectively, and reveal that they possess highly similar genetic architectures.

Results from a statewide field experiment conducted in Alaska highlight the relative importance of appeals to self (warm glow) in charitable fundraising. There is no evidence that appeals emphasizing altruism had an effect on average donations.

Archaeological and biomolecular investigations of ancient sheep remains from the site of Obishir V in southern Kyrgyzstan reveal that domestic livestock and Neolithic lifeways reached the heart of Central Asia by ca. 6,000 BCE, thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.

Rocklage et al. find a positivity problem: 80% or more of online ratings are positive and are unreliable predictors of success. As an alternative, mass-scale emotion predicts behaviour towards and success of movies, books, commercials and restaurants.

Havlin and colleagues quantify the freshness of a scientific team as the absence of prior collaboration among members. Papers of fresher teams are associated with higher originality and more multidisciplinary impact, with a stronger relationship among larger teams.

Xie et al. directly observe the percolation phase transition of information on large-scale online social media and find that the positive-feedback coevolution between users’ activity level and network structure greatly increases the spreading power.

Recent phone survey data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda reveals the breadth of the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals and households.