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Whether or not social networks are significantly changing due to emergent technologies continues to be contested by researchers. Our understanding may advance by clarifying the cognitive mechanisms through which people curate their connections, along with the accompanying role of personality in shaping networks in the future.
Hardwick et al. show that habits in human behaviour consist of automatic preparation of an action in response to a trigger. Even though we can learn to control habits to perform different action responses, under time pressure, habitual responses resurface.
In a cross-cultural study of eight diverse societies, House et al. provide evidence that links societal variation in prosociality to the development of a universal psychology for responding to social norms.
Fonzo et al. found that brain activity during a form of emotional regulation predicted how well individuals with depression would respond to a common antidepressant. Brain function assays may herald a new era of precision medicine in psychiatry.
Using a real-world navigation task, Bécu et al. find a preference for geometry-based navigation in older adults, and for landmark-based navigation in younger people. Older adults also show a decreased capacity to take perspective from landmarks.
Using a randomized design over 24 months, Mills et al. show that the addition of restorative-justice-informed practices to a typical treatment for domestic violence crimes leads to substantial reductions in new arrests and crime severity scores.
Smaldino et al. develop a formal model to explain cross-cultural differences in personality structure. Complex societies with more diverse niches show less covariation among behavioural traits, resulting in greater variability in personality types.
Memory slowly falters as we age. A new study by Dahl and colleagues tests the involvement of a tiny region hidden in the brainstem, the locus coeruleus, which enables cellular processes of learning. Better initial learning in older individuals was related to greater integrity of this region, particularly for the part that is connected to other memory regions in the brain.
Comparing the behaviour of humans and monkeys, Farashahi et al. show that both species take uncertainty into account when weighing reward value and probability. Both species switch to a more flexible strategy for weighing information during learning.
Dahl et al. use neuromelanin-sensitive neuroimaging in a cohort of participants spanning ages 25 to 83 and report that ‘youth-like’ rostral locus coeruleus integrity is associated with better memory performance in the elderly.
How does the relationship between political leaders and their followers affect attitudes and behaviours? Kunst and colleagues show that the psychological closeness followers experience with Donald Trump is associated with more willingness to endorse and engage in political violence.
Over two experiments and a replication, Molleman and colleagues show that, in cooperative interactions, people prefer to sanction their free-riding peers jointly with others rather than individually.
Humans and animals exhibit individual preferences in decision tasks. Lebovich et al quantify these idiosyncratic choice biases and demonstrates that such biases emerge naturally from intrinsic stochasticity in the dynamics of neuronal networks.