Articles in 2019

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  • Kvarven, Strømland and Johannesson compare meta-analyses to multiple-laboratory replication projects and find that meta-analyses overestimate effect sizes by a factor of almost three. Commonly used methods of adjusting for publication bias do not substantively improve results.

    • Amanda Kvarven
    • Eirik Strømland
    • Magnus Johannesson
    Article
  • What is the connection between the curated narrative of a society and the representations of memories in the individual brains of its members? In a new study, Gagnepain and colleagues show that the organization of memories in the brain reflects the structure of a culture’s shared discourse.

    • Matthew Siegelman
    • Christopher Baldassano
    News & Views
  • This paper calls for actors working to end violence against children to situate online violence within the broader violence against children agenda. This requires a common conceptual framework that addresses violence in all areas of children’s lives, improved data collection efforts and integrated implementation guidance for prevention.

    • Daniel Kardefelt-Winther
    • Catherine Maternowska
    Comment
  • From December 2019, authors of research articles submitted to Nature Human Behaviour will have the option to publish the full peer-review records of their manuscripts, including reviewer comments, editorial decision letters and their own responses to reviewer and editorial comments.

    Editorial
  • With diversity rising in the United States, do people believe that progress for black Americans means increased discrimination against white Americans? Despite prior evidence of such ‘zero-sum’ beliefs, a provocative new study by Earle and Hodson challenges this narrative with large, nationally representative samples.

    • Sylvia P. Perry
    • James E. Wages
    News & Views
  • Conveying an impression of competence is important for jobseekers and politicians alike. New work from Oh, Shafir and Todorov suggests that subtle differences in clothing shape our impressions of how competent people are. In particular, subtly richer-looking clothes elicit greater perceived competence.

    • Bradley D. Mattan
    • Jennifer T. Kubota
    News & Views
  • Van de Vliert finds that differentiation between ingroups and outgroups co-varies with latitude, but not longitude. Differentiation is highest closer to the equator, and this pattern may be explained by ecological conditions in tropical regions.

    • Evert Van de Vliert
    Article
  • Subtle economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces even when perceivers are warned that such cues are non-informative or are instructed and incentivized to ignore them. This bias puts low-income individuals at a disadvantage.

    • DongWon Oh
    • Eldar Shafir
    • Alexander Todorov
    Article
  • We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.

    • Balazs Aczel
    • Barnabas Szaszi
    • Eric-Jan Wagenmakers
    CommentOpen Access
  • Scholars have long disagreed about how best to achieve stable national democracy. Ruck et al. show that democratization follows from an intergenerational build-up of democratic cultural values, without which democracy is liable to fail.

    • Damian J. Ruck
    • Luke J. Matthews
    • R. Alexander Bentley
    Article
  • Interventions to reverse harmful traditions, such as female genital cutting, have had mixed success, sometimes backfiring. Policymakers’ intentions collide with cultural traditions and the ethics of tolerance collide with universal human rights. New research introduces a cultural evolutionary modelling framework to explain previous results and guide future campaigns for endogenous change.

    • Michael Muthukrishna
    News & Views
  • There is a longstanding debate about whether culture shapes regimes or regimes shape culture. New research by Ruck et al. resolves the debate in favor of culture’s causal primacy.

    • Christian Welzel
    News & Views