Letters in 2017

Muthukrishna et al. experimentally model the cost, causes and cures for corruption, showing that anti-corruption strategies can occasionally backfire.

Research has shown that people dislike inequality. However, in a cross-cultural experiment, Zhou and colleagues show that, from a young age, people are unwilling to redistribute resources between individuals if this reverses an existing hierarchy.

Peters et al. use intracranial recordings and machine-learning techniques to show that human subjects under-use decision-incongruent evidence in the brain when computing perceptual confidence.

Tannenbaum et al. show that partisan framing influences beliefs about the ethical use of behavioural policy interventions, but both US adults and practising policymakers are accepting of nudges when stripped of partisan cues.

Lockwood et al. use a real-effort task and computational modelling to examine how individuals choose to expend effort when rewards accrue to themselves versus others. They find that people are less motivated to work for others.

How should Europe allocate asylum seekers? Bansak et al. show that a majority of Europeans support allocating asylum seekers proportionally to each country’s capacity, rather than the current policy of allocation based on country of first entry.

Why does low-quality information go viral? A stylized model of social media predicts that under real-world conditions of high information load and limited attention, low- and high-quality information are equally likely to go viral.

Bang et al. use behavioural data in culturally distinct settings (United Kingdom and Iran) and computational modelling to show that, when making decisions in pairs, people adopt a confidence-matching heuristic to combine their opinions.

Assessment of moral judgements and social-cognitive profiles of Colombian paramilitary terrorists by Baez et al. reveals a moral code abnormally guided by outcomes, rather than the integration of intentions and outcomes.

Motor skill memories are consolidated and enhanced during sleep. Breton and Robertson show that the neural circuits that support offline memory improvements differ depending on how the memory was acquired — through implicit or explicit learning.

The advent of Acheulian stone-tool technologies 1.75 million years ago is likely to have coincided with changes in early human cognition. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging, modern Acheulian toolmakers are shown to use the same brain network as is involved in playing the piano.

A series of decision-making experiments with three recently diverged populations from the same ethnic group in Ethiopia demonstrates that dependence on social learning differs between interdependent pastoralists and independent horticulturalists.

People willing to incur significant costs to help strangers, ‘extraordinary altruists’, are shown to have an increased subjective valuation of the welfare of distant others, rather than a misconception of the social distance of strangers.

Obradovich and Fowler use data on participation in physical activity from 1.9 million US residents from 2002–2012, coupled with daily temperature data, to show that unmitigated climate change is likely to alter future patterns of physical activity.

In an analysis of 15,000 Facebook networks, Hobbs and Burke find that online social networks are resilient to the death of an individual, showing an increase in interactions between friends following a loss, which remains stable for years after.

Parkinson et al. combine social network analysis and multi-voxel pattern analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data to show that the brain spontaneously encodes social distance, the centrality of the individuals encountered, and the extent to which they serve to broker connections between members.

A co-purchase network analysis of data from two of the United States’ biggest online booksellers reveals a stark division in the types of scientific literature read by liberals and conservatives. Selective exposure may limit cross-partisan understanding.

Using a large-scale analysis of publication records and a random-walk model, Jia and colleagues show that the evolution of scientists’ research interests throughout their careers is characterized by a regular and reproducible pattern.

Takagi and colleagues present a model of how human pairs learn movements through touch. Participants learn in the same way when the model is applied to a robotic partner. This is important for the development of physical assistance robotics.

Betsch and colleagues show that vaccination willingness is higher in cultures that focus on collective benefits. For cultures that lack this prosocial cultural inclination, communicating the concept of herd immunity improves willingness to vaccinate.