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Performance data is dominating education policy, with many researchers and policymakers convinced that a data-based approach results in improved performance. The implications of this should be questioned by the research community to promote debate and consideration of choices excluded by data dependency.

Universal features of rhythmic music emerge culturally via iterated learning in the laboratory.

A new theory of city size, embodying ideas from economic complexity and cultural evolution, provides a rich basis for speculating on their economic structure and suggests hints as to how old cities might regenerate their past prosperity and how new ones might generate more success.

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.

Public health officials and politicians often use statistical complexity as an excuse to do nothing, says Danny Dorling.

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.

Researchers dig deeper into why the cultural practice of female genital cutting continues — and how best to halt it.

Leading voices in the reproducibility landscape call for the adoption of measures to optimize key elements of the scientific process.

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.

Gomez-Lievano and colleagues develop a new theory of scaling in cities — how the prevalence of phenomena such as education and crime changes with population size — by unifying models of economic complexity and cultural evolution.

He and colleagues show that attention plays a key role in anchoring visual orientation in 3D space. The effect of attention was contingent on the ground being visible, suggesting our terrestrial visual system is best served by its ecological niche.

The authors asked human participants to listen to and imitate randomly generated drumming sequences from each other. Participants turned initially random sequences into rhythmically structured patterns that are characterized by all six statistical universals found in world music.

By linking data from a 40-year birth cohort study with multiple administrative databases, the authors show that 20% of the population accounts for close to 80% of economic burden. Strikingly, this group can be predicted with high accuracy from as early as 3 years old.

Confronting fears is a core component of cognitive behavioural therapies for anxiety disorders, but also a major hurdle for patients. A new study introduces a method for reducing defensive responses without consciously confronting the threatening cues, paving the way for fear-reducing therapies via unconscious processing.

Koizumi and colleagues show that it is possible to reduce fear without explicit representations of feared objects by pairing rewards with activation patterns in the visual cortex that represent a conditioned stimulus, while participants remain unaware of the purpose of the procedure.

Decreases in pathogen prevalence in the US and the UK over the past several decades are linked to reduced gender inequality. These shifts in rates of infectious disease precede shifts in gender inequality, suggesting a causal link.