Comment in 2021

Behavioural science can enhance ocean sustainability by providing insights into illegal fishing. Current enforcement criminalizes small-scale fishers and fails to address root causes, letting large-scale illegal fishing off the hook. Efforts to address illegal fishing would benefit from more holistic behavioural research.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy amongst Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups has recently been well observed, and is symptomatic of wider health inequalities. An approach that unites insights from sociology and medicine is the only way to address this pressing issue.

Nudges are tools to achieve behavioural change. To evaluate nudges, it is essential to consider not only their overall welfare effects but also their distributional effects. Some nudges will not help, and might hurt, identifiable groups. More targeted, personalized nudging may be needed to maximize social welfare and promote distributive justice.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theorists have exploited the provisional nature of scientific consensus and the realities of how science is conducted to paint scientists and public health leaders as malign actors.

Reading scientific papers is a necessary part of the research enterprise, but poor writing impedes the flow of information from authors to their audiences. We argue that a return to narrative in scientific writing is not incompatible with rigour and objectivity; it can mitigate information overload and achieve the core purpose of publication: to communicate.

At Wellcome we are committed to finding the next generation of approaches for youth anxiety and depression. Since 2020 we have been learning what works, for whom, and why, by commissioning reviews into the ‘active ingredients’ of successful interventions. Here we share four key calls to action that we hope the mental health science community can take forward.

What is the long-term impact of technological advances on cognitive abilities? We critically examine relevant findings and argue that there is no clear evidence for detrimental lasting effects of digital technology on cognitive abilities. But we also suggest how digital technology may be changing predominant ways of cognition.

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Science is still an enterprise in which positions of power are mainly held by white, cis-gender, male academics. We discuss how the legacy of science’s exclusionary past still persists in scientific structures and propose concrete changes to open the system to a more diverse future.

Research centres in low- and middle-income countries are routinely circumvented in the production of cross-cultural research on human behaviour. Where local contributions are made, collaboration is rarely equitable and often uncredited in co-authorship. Efforts to decolonize the social sciences will remain inadequate until these norms are overturned.

Many US federal agencies apply principles from risk communication science across a wide variety of hazards. In so doing, they identify key research and practice gaps that, if addressed, could help better serve the nation’s communities and greatly enhance practice, research, and policy development.

Conferences are a pivotal part of the scientific enterprise, but large in-person meetings have several disadvantages. As the pandemic experience has shown, online meetings are a viable alternative. Accelerating efforts to improve conferences in virtual formats can lead to a more equitable and sustainable conference culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused rushed digitalization of primary and secondary (K12) student education, and cyber-risks such as bullying, technology addiction, and misinformation must be addressed. There is an urgent need to coordinate global efforts for digital skills education and training, which can help students succeed in the digital age while curbing risks and inequality.