Reviews & Analysis

Multiple guesses from one individual, like guesses from a crowd, yield a better estimate when averaged. How far can such solipsistic polling take us in real, high-stakes settings? Now 1.2 million incentivized, real-world guesses show just how much people can improve their judgements by reconsidering their own estimates.

New research suggests links between disliking visual patterns that contain irregularities and disliking people who are different in some way. Now we need to understand better the parameters of this effect, the mechanisms behind it and its developmental origins.

No plant, animal or human is impervious to the problems posed by bitter winters and scorching summers. Two large studies suggest that many Chinese and US inhabitants have adapted their personality to the temperatures at the place where they grew up.

The brain circuitry underlying our love of music is illuminated by a new study that uses brain stimulation to alter emotional reactions to favourite songs.

Lamont et al. identify opportunities for cognitive bandwidth, dual-process morality and implicit association research to engage with ‘cultural repertoires’, defined as cultural schemas, frames, narratives, scripts and boundaries that actors draw on in social situations.

Functional brain-imaging methods provide rich datasets that can be exploited by machine-learning techniques to help assess psychiatric disorders. A recent study uses this approach to identify patients with suicidal thoughts, and to distinguish those who have attempted suicide from those who have not.

Consistent failure over the past few decades to reduce the high prevalence of stress-related disorders has motivated a search for alternative research strategies. Resilience refers to the phenomenon of many people maintaining mental health despite exposure to psychological or physical adversity. Instead of aiming to understand the pathophysiology of stress-related disorders, resilience research focuses on protective mechanisms that shield people against the development of such disorders and tries to exploit its insights to improve treatment and, in particular, disease prevention. To fully harness the potential of resilience research, a critical appraisal of the current state of the art — in terms of basic concepts and key methods — is needed. We highlight challenges to resilience research and make concrete conceptual and methodological proposals to improve resilience research. Most importantly, we propose to focus research on the dynamic processes of successful adaptation to stressors in prospective longitudinal studies.

In the United States, direct-to-consumer advertisements for medications must disclose each specific side-effect risk. A new study demonstrates a counterintuitive dilution effect: people perceive drug descriptions that include both serious and trivial side effects as less risky than descriptions that only list serious side effects.

A new study shows that brain responses to unfairness during economic decision-making can predict current and future depression indices. Neural response patterns in the amygdala related to inequity tracked indices of depression, particularly for prosocial individuals who tend to be most self-sacrificing.

A quasi-experimental study of the generalized enforcement of low-level violations in New York City finds that proactive policing increases crime. This finding suggests the importance of taking a careful look at aggressive enforcement approaches used by police to reduce crime as they may be causing harm in urban communities.

It is easier to make sense of the visual environment if we know where to look. Eye movement measurements show just how quickly we can find the informative parts of a scene, even when we do not know what to expect.

Friederici et al. outline a view of the neural organization of language that is compatible with a description of language as a biologically determined computational mechanism that yields an infinite number of hierarchically structured expressions.

What would motivate someone to willingly enter frontline combat against the Islamic State? New research finds three compelling reasons: commitment to some sacred values, forsaking commitment to their own kin for those same values, and belief in the spiritual strength of one’s own group compared to that of the enemy.

Social norms are the dominant behavioural patterns in a group that affect how people follow rules and regulations. A new modelling study shows, for different localities around the world, how the combination of biophysical context and social norms affects cooperation in water conservation.

Many studies have shown that human cooperation is fostered by altruistic cooperation and the altruistic punishment of freeriders. A study now shows significant asymmetries between cooperation in the initial provision of a social good and cooperation in the maintenance of an established social good.

Sagiv et al. review two decades of research into personal values. Although subjective in nature, self-reported values predict a large array of attitudes and preferences. As such, they provide invaluable insight into human behaviour.

Modelling and experiments have shown that strategic information can undermine ‘altruistic’ cooperation. Using a model that varies the distribution of costs for finding out, it is now shown that information can also promote self-interested ‘strategic’ cooperation.

The basal ganglia are a core structure of the human brain with strong and reciprocal connections to most areas of the cerebral cortex. Analyses of human functional MRI data, collected during rest and analysed using a novel approach, support the notion that these connectivity patterns underlie differences in decision-making behaviour.

How robust is the perceived association between immorality and atheism? Studies across 13 countries demonstrate that immoral behaviour is intuitively associated with atheism: people routinely assume that an immoral person is likely to be an atheist, and this effect is consistent across a wide range of societies, though with notable variation.

Combining numerical information on-the-fly is crucial for making advantageous decisions, but precisely how humans are able to track and compare magnitudes is unclear. Experiments now suggest that when it comes to performing such tasks, not all numbers are created equal.