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Although migration has always been part of human behaviour, it isn't natural; rather, it is a necessary response to various forms of violence and adversity, says Heide Castañeda.
Europe has witnessed an increase in covert cultural racism that is reflected in recent political turmoil in its nation-states. Far-right movements and populists are exploiting fear about existential and ontological threats to spur the exclusion of unwanted ‘others’, such as Muslims, Roma, and refugees.
It has long been assumed that grammar is a system of abstract rules, that the world's languages follow universal patterns, and that we are born with a ‘language instinct’. But an alternative paradigm that focuses on how we learn and use language is emerging, overturning these assumptions and many more.
Experiments show that people dislike inequality, but are they willing to overturn established hierarchies to achieve income equality? A cross-cultural experiment shows that from a young age humans exhibit rank reversal aversion when redistributing resources between the rich and the poor, suggesting that hierarchy preservation is a social norm.
Recent theories propose that perceptions, decisions, and behaviour rely on many rational neural observers that work to predict the value of stimuli and actions. This Bayesian framework has now advanced into new territory through a study of dopamine's influence on the integration of sensory (new) and prior (old) information in Parkinson's disease.
Small interventions in everyday public environments hold great potential to positively impact health behaviours. TIPPME is a framework that will provide consensus and definitional precision across intervention research into the purchase and consumption of tobacco, alcohol and food.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Research has shown that people dislike inequality. However, in a cross-cultural experiment, Zhou and colleagues show that, from a young age, people are unwilling to redistribute resources between individuals if this reverses an existing hierarchy.
How does the neurotransmitter dopamine and Parkinson’s disease (PD) affect decision-making under uncertainty? Vilares and Kording find that dopamine levels, which are affected by PD and the drugs used for its treatment, influence reliance on new versus prior information in decision-making.
Hollands and colleagues classify possible interventions regarding the selection, purchase and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco. The TIPPME framework enables systematic reporting and analysis of health-related behavioural change interventions.
Spitzer et al. investigate the neural and computational mechanisms involved in weighting, integrating and comparing numbers. They find systematic overweighting of larger numbers, which is reflected in stronger neural signals over the parietal cortex.
Using resting-state fMRI, Marquand et al. estimate striatal connection topographies in humans and find correspondence with those predicted from primate tracing studies. Individual variation in connectivity is predictive of several goal-directed behaviours.
Gervais et al. present evidence from 13 different countries that shows intuitive moral distrust of atheists is pervasive, even among atheists themselves.
In a model that varies the cost of deliberation, a range of cooperative strategies involving strategic ignorance and Bayesian learning can evolve, including dual-process defectors, who intuitively defect, but may choose to cooperate.
