Articles

By examining patterns in public-facing communications of US politicians, the authors identify two honesty-related concepts: belief speaking and fact speaking. They find that for Republicans, but not Democrats, an increase of belief speaking is associated with a decrease in the quality of the shared content sources.

Using a set of experiments, the authors show that discrimination reduces work effort of those who are disadvantaged and those who are advantaged by it.

In a series of human functional MRI studies, Zhang et al. find that the activation of two brain areas typically involved in language comprehension reflects working memory of social semantics rather than general semantic or syntactic processing.

Ferguson et al. test the effectiveness of messages designed to increase rates of repeat blood donation and find that warm-glow feelings as a motivation for cooperation cool over time but can be reactivated.

Lackner et al. show that individuals with an intermediate level of science knowledge tend to have overconfidence in their own knowledge and negative attitudes to science.

In this study of bird biodiversity data from across 195 US cities, Ellis-Soto et al. show that historical redlining is associated with increasing inequality in sampling. Historically redlined neighbourhoods remain the most undersampled areas.

McKee et al. show that deep reinforcement learning can be used to learn a new and effective strategy for encouraging mutually beneficial cooperation in a network game.

Hopp et al. probe the neural (dis)unity of moral foundations theory and report that each moral foundation recruits domain-general mechanisms of social cognition but also has a dissociable neural signature malleable by sociomoral experience.

In a study of 28 European Union member states, Wolfowicz et al. found that increased levels of terrorism-related arrests and convictions are associated with decreases in terrorism. However, evidence concerning the role of more severe punishment was mixed.

This study of monthly mortality records in the United States during 2001–2016 shows that Black people shouldered a higher mortality burden from PM_2.5-related heart disease than non-Hispanic white people despite overall reductions in pollution levels.

Schurer et al. investigate the impact of Melbourne’s 111-day hard lockdown on different domains of adult human life. Results show that there were some significant but small impacts on human life, with greater adverse effects for parents.

Meta-analyses of 22 traits and analyses of 133 traits from UK Biobank find widespread evidence of mate similarity, particularly for social attitudes, education and substance use traits.

The authors use a series of self-finding games—wherein players must identify themselves when there are multiple potential candidates—to show that humans are near optimal at self-orienting, whereas popular reinforcement learning algorithms are not.

Heat is associated with higher household food insecurity within days of exposure across 150 countries as households. This is mediated by income. Regions with lower incomes and more agricultural or precarious employment are most affected.

Despite widespread concern that social media exacerbates incivility and partisan polarization, few solutions have been identified. In contrast to the popular wisdom, Combs et al. find that anonymous online conversations can reduce polarization.

Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others’ successes. Hawkins et al. use a large-scale collective sensing paradigm to test how individual social inference abilities shape the emergent behaviour of human groups.

Giron et al. provide empirical evidence that human development has much in common with the algorithm of ‘stochastic optimization’ widely used in machine learning, resolving ambiguities around commonly used analogies in developmental psychology.

The authors show that video game playtime restriction policies in China had no discernible influence on time spent gaming.

This meta-analysis of the relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behaviour finds that the relationship varies from being negative to positive, but, on average, higher economic inequality is associated with lower prosocial behaviour.

Christia et al. evaluate the delivery of content to empower women exposed to violence amid COVID-19. The recipients exhibited no credible evidence of a shift in attitudes but increased their knowledge and hypothetical and reported use of resources.