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Grand, Blank, et al. show that context-dependent knowledge about objects, such as the similarities between animals in terms of size versus danger versus habitat, can be recovered from word embeddings via a simple, interpretable geometrical operation.
Eble and Hu show how a common stereotype—the belief that boys are innately better at mathematics than girls—transmits across generations through children’s peers and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing maths scores up for boys and down for girls.
Glickman et al. identify an evidence integration bias whereby the relative weighting of incoming information towards a decision is increased based on its consistency with preceding evidence, resulting in a pre-decision confirmation bias.
In a comparative cross-cultural study of genital mutilation/cutting, Šaffa et al. find that this range of practices may have originated in the mid-Holocene (5,000–7,000 years ago), with male genital mutilation/cutting predating female genital mutilation/cutting.
Using monthly water billing data for 1.5 million accounts in Singapore, Agarwal et al. show that nationwide efficiency improvements reduce residential water use by 3.5% for at least ten years but find no evidence of benefits from a nationwide peer-comparison nudge.
A natural experiment in the environmental domain shows how attempts to increase prosocial behaviours like recycling using monetary rewards can be counter-productive, and how this effect depends on underlying pro-environmental motivation.
Using tweets in over 100 countries, Wang et al. examine evidence of global sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that COVID-19 outbreaks caused a decline in sentiment worldwide, and the effects of lockdowns differed across countries.
Using detailed data on credit and debit card transactions, Lai et al. show an inverted U-shaped relationship between temperature and consumption in the short run. Adaptation moderates the relationship in the long run.
How do brain networks encode naturalistic affective behaviours? Bijanzadeh et al. show that positive and negative affective behaviours are associated with increased high-frequency and decreased low-frequency activity across the mesolimbic network.
The human brain estimates task controllability by comparing the reliability of internal models predicting future events using only past events, or a mixture of past events and past actions. Exposure to uncontrollable stressors distorts this process.
Using qualitative and quantitative methods, Baumard et al. build a database of ancient literary fiction. They find that higher levels of economic development are associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction.
Yoo et al. introduce a model that predicts a person’s overall attentional functioning from functional magnetic resonance imaging data and show that this is generalizable across five different datasets.
Using electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, Graumann et al. examine where, how and when representations of object location and category emerge in the human brain.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, medical equipment shortages reached critical levels. Crabtree, Holbein and Monson use conjoint experiments and find that during this time, individual biases impacted health-care providers’ allocation of life-saving care.
Leveraging a global dataset, the authors show how sleep away from home depends on the sleep needs of the individual: when travelling, underslept people tend to sleep more, while well-rested individuals tend to sleep less.
Lobinska et al. explore the evolutionary dynamics of COVID-19. Their results suggest that even with fast vaccination, social distancing (or contact reduction) must be maintained to minimize the risk of selecting for vaccine-resistant variants.
Bürgers and Noppeney provide evidence that alpha oscillation frequency is not related to visual one- versus two-flash discrimination in unisensory or audiovisual contexts of the sound-induced flash illusion, either within or between observers.
Ruisch and Ferguson examine changes in prejudice in the United States during Trump’s presidency. They find both increases in prejudice amongst Trump’s supporters and decreases amongst those opposed to Trump, changes that seem to stem from perceived social norms.
Using data from over one million people, von Krause et al. show that mental speed in a decision task remains steady up to age 60, and that slowing response times before this age are due to decision caution and non-decision processes.
Using over 600 genetic matches of elephant tusks from the same individual or close relatives, from 49 ivory seizures across Africa, Wasser et al. reveal the scale, connectivity and movements of transnational criminal organizations that trade in ivory.