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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.
Kristal and Whillans conducted five field experiments (n = 68,915) designed to increase sustainable commuting using standard behavioural science tools. The interventions’ failures highlight the difficulty of changing commuter behaviour using this approach.
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.
The media can shape the collective memory of a nation. A new study reports that the organization of memory traces for World War II events in the brain follows the same structure as the collective memory schema derived from television coverage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Earle and Hodson find that discrimination perceptions differ from reported discrimination experiences, and that declines in anti-black discrimination have not coincided with increases in anti-white discrimination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Efferson et al. use models to examine the reversal of traditions such as female genital cutting. They find that interventions should avoid targeting agents amenable to change and should disrupt any link between cultural identity and traditional practice.