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Combining mobile tracking data and a survey experiment, Munzert et al. show that Germany’s contact tracing app is underused by those who socially distance less; however, even small cash incentives increased app uptake in the cohort.
When generating an informal shortlist for a role in a male-dominant domain (for example, technology executive), making the shortlist longer increases the inclusion of female candidates on the list.
Using data from a large UK police force, Vomfell and Stewart examine ethnic bias in decisions to stop and search individuals. They find that both officer bias and biased patrolling decisions contribute to the over-searching of ethnic minorities.
Bahrami et al. identify substantial polygenic overlap between major depressive disorder and general intelligence. Despite low genetic correlation, the authors singled out 92 genomic loci shared by the two phenotypes, with a mixture of allelic effect directions.
By varying the presence of different building blocks in a computational model, Jackson et al. reverse-engineer the architecture for controlled semantic cognition and test this model against evidence from anatomy, neuropsychology and functional imaging.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, suicide rates in Japan declined by 14% during the initial wave (February to June 2020) but increased by 16% in the second wave (July to October 2020), with a larger increase (37%) among females.
Herle et al. provide evidence that common genetic variants associated with BMI are also associated with eating behaviour trajectories in childhood, supporting the behavioural susceptibility theory of obesity.
Stein and Peelen show that discrimination performance can be used to dissociate conscious and unconscious contributions to detection effects in face perception and attention tasks.
Ma et al. examine why and how crowd synchronization forms spontaneously under different density conditions and what functional benefit synchronization offers for the collective motion of humans.
Wood et al. examine gender differences in Hadza hunter-gatherer spatial behaviour using 2,078 days of GPS-recorded travel. As predicted from principles of foraging ecology, Hadza men walked further per day, explored more land, followed more sinuous paths and were much more likely to be alone.
Alvarez-Rodriguez et al. examine group interactions by means of higher-order social networks. They propose a theoretical framework for studying real-world interactions and provide a case study of collaboration in science and technology.
Models indicate that reciprocity cannot evolve when errors lead to frequent misunderstanding between cooperators. Boyd and Mathew show that third-party arbitration allows reciprocity to thrive even when errors are common and arbitration is imperfect.
Deco et al. use multimodal neuroimaging data to quantify the global workspace as the common ‘functional rich club’ of regions intersecting across seven tasks as well as rest.
Zhang et al. build a cultural phylogeny of historical Islamic sects and schools from the seventh to twentieth centuries and use phylogenetic comparative methods to show that apocalyptic and reincarnation beliefs display distinct relationships with intergroup violence.
Integrating human mobility and activity data with ground-level measurements and air quality models, Shen et al. find that despite a reduction in outdoor PM2.5 during the COVID-19 quarantine in China, overall population exposure to PM2.5 increased.
Accounting for the genetic effects of education and socioeconomic status, psychopathology and psychosocial factors revealed trait-specific genetic architecture, associated biological inference and correlative and putatively causal relationships.
Dietze and Craig find that framing economic inequality as group disadvantages (versus advantages) increases Americans’ engagement with the issue and support for mitigating action. This is partly driven by perceptions of disadvantages as more unjust.
Kelly, Corbett and O’Connell use neurally informed modelling to establish that humans account for time constraints and prior probability in their perceptual decisions by adjusting multiple distinct components of a build-to-threshold process.
The authors investigated over 100 human complex traits in 80,889 couples from UK Biobank, finding evidence that the genotype of one person explains trait variation in another person. The genotypes of those around us are an important part of our environment.
Studies of transfers of surplus military equipment to police have argued that they reduce crime. Gunderson et al. reanalysed US federal data and replicated key studies. They find no credible evidence that crime drops when local police get more SME.