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In a study examining 24 US policy issues and 48 persuasive information treatments, the authors find no evidence that US partisans’ receptivity to persuasive information is diminished by countervailing cues from favoured party leaders.
Mathieson et al. carried out a genome-wide association study of reproductive success (number of children born) in humans, revealing the importance of diverse neuro-endocrine and behavioural factors.
Current machine learning language algorithms make adjacent word-level predictions. In this work, Caucheteux et al. show that the human brain probably uses long-range and hierarchical predictions, taking into account up to eight possible words into the future.
An analysis of 52 million births in 26 countries shows small reductions in preterm birth during the first to third months of lockdown. Further research is needed to examine causal pathways.
In a series of experiments, Jangraw et al. show that people’s mood declines over time in common psychological tasks and during rest periods, but not in freely chosen behaviours.
Silverman et al. find that Black, Latinx and Indigenous (BLI) students receive lower grades than non-BLI students with similar patterns of motivation. This inequitable motivational payoff is linked to teachers’ racially biased beliefs about students.
Yeo et al. use digital data on student behaviour (Wi-Fi connections and Learning Management System logins) to examine associations between sleep and academic outcomes.
This meta-analysis examines how genetic variation is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, their overlap and their co-occurrence with disruptive, impulse control and conduct disorders.
This rapid realist review of universal interventions to promote inclusivity and acceptance of diverse sexual and gender identities in schools finds that interventions appear to work best when school staff are trained and the school climate is supportive. Interventions may be less effective for boys, gender minority students and bisexual students.
Holt and Vinopal use nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey to find that low-income people are more likely to wait, and to wait longer, when using basic services relative to high-income people.
How accurate are social scientists in predicting societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? Grossmann et al. report the findings of two forecasting tournaments. Social scientists’ forecasts were on average no more accurate than those of simple statistical models.
This meta-analysis of 42 studies finds that learning progress has slowed during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, particularly among children from low socio-economic backgrounds and in poorer countries. Reported learning deficits were larger in maths than in reading.
During the Last Ice Age, Neanderthals used a small cave in the Iberian Peninsula to accumulate the crania of large ungulates (bison, aurochs, red deer and rhinoceroses), some associated with small hearths. This seems to have been a symbolic practice.
The authors use large-scale data on urban productivity, innovation and social connectivity, as well as extensive mathematical modelling, and show that power-law urban scaling laws arise out of urban inequalities.
Leveraging multiple datasets (surveys, web search trends and mobility), Huang et al. document how anti-Chinese rhetoric led to blame sentiment and consumer discrimination against Asian American businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The authors introduce a deep learning framework to reproduce sequences of response times and use it to provide evidence for a stability–flexibility trade-off underlying task-switching costs.
Lockdowns may help control disease, but also come with potential costs. Domestic violence complaints in India increased in districts with the strictest lockdown rules, and remained higher 1 year later, even after restrictions were loosened.
Using longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data, Danielsen et al. find no indication that the proportion of Danish young adults with self-injury, suicidality or eating disorder symptoms increased during lockdown.
Using publication and editorial team composition records from more than 1,000 journals, Liu and coauthors uncover pervasive gender inequalities among academic editors. Only 8% of editors-in-chief are women. Nearly 6% of editors publish one-third of all their papers in the journal they edit, and this self-publication pattern is stronger among men editors.