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Blair and Weintraub evaluate a military policing programme in Cali, Colombia. They find little to no evidence that the programme reduced crime, improved citizens’ perceptions of safety or mitigated human rights abuses.
In an experiment using publicly available New York City traffic camera feeds, Sands and Dietrich find that pedestrians tend to avoid Black men more than white non-Hispanic men by leaving more space when passing.
The authors use information on 14 traits and create a representative pseudo-sample of the UK Biobank population, showing that participation bias distorts behavioural genome-wide association study and Mendelian randomization findings.
Boda et al. find that refugee adolescents in Germany have fewer friends and are more often rejected in school. However, ethnic diversity supports social integration, with majority group peers building more positive ties to refugees in more diverse settings.
Schaffner et al. show that early stages of sensory processing in humans and machines encode environmental stimuli to promote fitness maximization and not necessarily perceptual accuracy.
The authors use data on the entire Finnish population to develop a machine learning model for predicting COVID-19 vaccination uptake. Important predictors are proxies of socio-economic status, and those at high risk for COVID-19 consequences are less likely to get vaccinated.
Algorithmic gender and race/ethnicity inference tools based on author names have very high error rates in marginalized communities. This may result in misleading results in many computational social science and sociology projects.
Moore et al. find that fewer Americans visited misinformation websites during the 2020 election compared with the 2016 election. However, demographic groups more likely to be exposed to misinformation in 2016 remained more likely to be exposed in 2020.
Reading performance is associated with nine measures of brain structure in the left hemisphere, including regions of the reading network. This relationship is partially mediated by genetic factors for two surface area measures: total area and superior temporal gyrus.
Botvinik-Nezer et al. identify robust preference effects on updating of fraud beliefs related to the 2020 US election, across both political parties. Computational models explain these effects as rational updates from a system of biased prior beliefs.
Humans use supernatural beliefs as tools for explanation. These explanations are more likely to focus on natural phenomena than social phenomena, according to this quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 societies.
Vives et al. show that uncertainty-averse individuals represent semantic concepts in a more separated form at both psychological and neural levels. As a consequence, uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit reduced semantic interference but also poorer generalization.
This umbrella review of meta-analytic evidence reveals that previously reported benefits of physical exercise on cognitive function may have been exaggerated. The authors emphasize the importance of obtaining stronger evidence to confirm the causal relationship between regular physical exercise and enhancements in cognitive functioning.
Aquino et al. show using human brain recordings that the pre-supplementary motor area encodes an integrated utility signal for each choice option and, subsequently, the decision itself.
In a preregistered experiment, participants were randomly assigned to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that this endorsement affected polarized trust in scientific expertise and caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters.