Perspectives

Behaviour change is crucial to preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the absence of pharmaceutical interventions. West et al. argue that we urgently need effective interventions to increase adherence to personal protective behaviours.

Forty-three experts highlight some key insights from the social and behavioural sciences for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and point out important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

Claessens et al. propose that the two dimensions of political ideology identified by previous research correspond to two key shifts in the evolution of human group living: a shift towards cooperation and a shift towards group conformity.

Many decisions in life involve deliberating about trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. Bulley and Schacter argue that the mechanisms of prospection and metacognition are integral to deliberation in intertemporal choice.

Sharot and Sunstein propose a framework of information-seeking, whereby individuals decide to seek or avoid information based on combined estimates of the potential impact of information on their action, affect and cognition.

This perspective discusses the theoretical and statistical foundations of the analyses of inter-individual differences in task-related functional MRI, offering recommendations for improving statistical validity and interpretability of inter-individual differences in functional MRI.

Núñez et al. use bibliometric and socio-institutional indicators to show that over the years, cognitive science has failed to transition to a mature, coherent, interdisciplinary field.

How do the arguments and insights of neoclassical and behavioural economics relate to one another? Aumann offers a synthesis of the two approaches based on the concept of rule-rationality.

How do people seek to reduce uncertainty in social interactions? FeldmanHall & Shenhav propose a three-part model: first through more automatic impression formation, then more effortful perspective-taking, and finally by seeking and learning about additional information that can update their predictions

Why do people engage in collective decisions? El Zein, Bahrami & Hertwig argue that—through sharing responsibility—joint decisions protect individuals from possible negative consequences of difficult decisions by reducing regret and stress and helping avoid punishment.

Neurofeedback training is considered a promising tool in psychiatric intervention. To enable neurofeedback to fulfil its promise, Lubianiker et al introduce a process-based neurofeedback framework to guide future research and interventions.

Browman and colleagues review the empirical and theoretical literature and present a framework that unifies economic and psychological perspectives on the impact of inequality on mobility expectations in socioeconomically disadvantaged youth

Muthukrishna & Henrich argue that solving the replication crisis in psychology partly requires well-specified, overarching theoretical frameworks. They outline how dual inheritance theory provides one such example that could be adopted by the field.

Russ et al. discuss the broad applications of data science to mental health research and consider future ways that big data can improve detection, diagnosis, treatment, healthcare provision and disease management.

How to establish causal links is a central question across scientific disciplines. Marinescu and colleagues describe methods from empirical economics and how they could be adapted across fields, for example, to psychology and neuroscience, to test causality.

Herd and colleagues outline a framework for collaboration between social and population health scientists to better understand how the human microbiome and social environments interact and co-develop.

Increasing gender diversity can bring about substantial benefits for research and society. Nielsen et al. propose a framework for increased diversity not only in the composition of teams, but also in research methods and in the questions targeted by research.

Human infants need a social environment to survive as they rely on caregivers to maintain allostasis. This Perspective proposes that the need of others to regulate physiological changes determines brain development, not only in the social domain.

The success of humans as the last surviving species of the hominin clade may be explained by our ecological plasticity. Roberts and Stewart review evidence for human dispersal 300,000–12,000 years before present and propose that humans thrived via a unique ‘generalist specialist’ ecological niche.

The social science of happiness needs to recognize the importance of social connection and prosocial action for human well-being and become more interdisciplinary with greater collaboration, especially among social scientists and policymakers.