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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.
By developing wireless sensors to track social interactions among hunter-gatherers in the Republic of the Congo and the Philippines, Migliano et al. find that a few strong friendship ties connecting unrelated families lead to more efficient social networks.
Pah et al. analyse gun violence incidents at US schools for the period 1990–2013 and find heightened rates in the period 2007–2013. Indicators of economic distress significantly correlate with increases in the rate of gun violence.
Over six experiments, Kanakogi et al. show that infants as young as 6 months support third-party interventions that protect victims from aggressors. This suggests that human emphasis upon such acts is rooted within the preverbal infant’s mind.
Using ultra-high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors identify six widely separated maps in the human cortex that code for numerosity (the number of objects in a set).
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.