Letters

Through a randomized field experiment, researchers at Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab demonstrate that a low-cost nudge informing immigrants about their eligibility for a federal fee waiver increased rates of citizenship applications.

Data-driven analysis of 156,558 papers uncovers universal patterns in the selection of citations across paper sections, as well as important differences in micro-level citation patterns that reveal the ultimate impact of the citing paper itself.

A values-alignment intervention taught eighth graders about how junk food marketing subverts the core adolescent values of autonomy and social justice. This shifted adolescents’ dietary preferences away from unhealthy choices and towards healthy choices.

Kobayashi et al. show that when options are defined by multiple attributes, people are curious about individual attributes regardless of the uncertainty of the total outcome, revealing a distinct type of anticipatory utility that shapes curiosity.

Research into emotion dynamics and well-being has, over the years, used an increasing number of dynamic measures to capture emotional change. Dejonckheere et al. show that these measures add little to the information conveyed by mean affect and its variance.

Data from a cohort of US and UK adolescents reveal that genetic and neighbourhood risks for early pregnancy and educational attainment are correlated, but find a weak or no correlation between risks for obesity or schizophrenia.

Neidorf et al. analyse the style of all surviving Old English poetry. They find quantitative evidence that a single author composed Beowulf and that the poem Andreas was written by Cynewulf—two longstanding questions of English literary history.

Joffe et al. report the Fix-it hazard preparedness intervention, which increased earthquake and fire preparedness in two cultures. Household preparedness showed long-term change and was predicted by higher outcome expectancy and home ownership.

An experiment shows that complex technologies need not result from our superior causal reasoning abilities but, instead, can emerge from the accumulation of improvements across generations without requiring understanding of how these technologies work.

Matoba et al. examine genetic components of smoking behaviours in the Japanese population, identifying seven novel loci and 11 diseases that share genetic bases with smoking behaviours.

This article explores the effect of ideological polarization on team performance. By analysing millions of edits to Wikipedia, the authors reveal that politically diverse editor teams produce higher-quality articles than homogeneous or moderate teams, and they identify the mechanisms responsible for producing these superior articles.

van Ede et al. show that focusing on a visual representation held in memory biases gaze towards its memorized location. This suggests that gaze control and attentional focusing within memorized space rely on the same system.

Evacuees who intermarry and remain in the host society gain socioeconomic benefits but suffer reduced fertility. This suggests that integration involves trade-offs between within-group ‘bonding’ social networks and between-group ‘bridging’ networks

Schaffnit et al. present data indicating that early marriage (<18 years of age) may serve both parents’ and daughters’ strategic interests in rural Tanzania. This conclusion is in contrast to common assumptions of the global ‘end child marriage’ movement.

What conditions produce a willingness to sacrifice our own self-interest for others? McGrath and Gerber find that collaboration increases willingness to sacrifice, distinct from considerations of accountability, in-group favouritism or disparity.

How good are people at choosing between exploration and exploitation? In a task that captures the essence of such decisions, Song et al. found systematic deviations from optimality that were associated with the sequence of decisions participants can make.

Bocanegra and colleagues present a new variation of the Raven intelligence test, an established measure of cognitive function; better performance on this new version, which allows problem-solving to be externalized, is associated with students’ success in exams.

Jackson and colleagues apply methods from computational linguistics to show that American norms grew looser from 1800 to 2000. Looser American norms over time were positively associated with societal creativity but negatively associated with order.

Data from three diverse post-conflict societies show that individuals with greater war exposure, several years later, were more likely to participate in religious groups and rituals. This reveals a link from violent conflict to religiosity.

Forscher et al. probe whether grant reviewers discriminate on the basis of principal investigator race or gender. In an experiment involving 412 active scientists, the authors find no evidence of pragmatically important bias.