Volume 2 Issue 10, October 2018

In 2017, Catalonia unilaterally declared independence from Spain. The independence push was not simply a bottom-up process wherein citizens increasingly demanded independence. Catalan political elites were more radical than voters and competitive outbidding to win hegemony in the pro-independence camp fuelled the independence push.

Influenza is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality around the world. Nudges are small changes to the environment or choice architecture that can be designed to significantly increase influenza vaccination rates.

We rapidly make inferences about the moral character of others. Observing a single immoral behaviour is often sufficient to make us think of them as morally ‘unworthy’. But our beliefs about others’ ‘badness’ (as opposed to ‘goodness’) are more uncertain. That is, we allow ourselves more space to re-assess and, if needed, rectify these beliefs.

Network neuroscience has begun to generate fundamental insights into the structures and dynamics that lie beneath human cognition. Targeting the question what creates differences between humans, a study finds that individual differences in connectivity patterns in brain networks underlie individual differences in task performance.

Increasing gender diversity can bring about substantial benefits for research and society. Nielsen et al. propose a framework for increased diversity not only in the composition of teams, but also in research methods and in the questions targeted by research.

Gerlach and colleagues harness the power of big data to address the question of whether individuals can be reliably classified into personality types and how many types exist. The authors identify four different personality types, which surface across data sets.

A five-arm trial with 228,000 participants found that a single mailed letter increased absolute influenza vaccination rates in individuals ≥66 years of age by about 1%. The framing of the letter made no significant difference to the outcome.

Siegel et al. describe an asymmetric Bayesian updating mechanism for moral impression formation, which shows that beliefs about badly behaved agents are more uncertain and therefore more flexible than beliefs about well-behaved agents.

Analyses of data from 211 independent, randomized controlled trials (N = 16,198,595) show that second-order normative beliefs—community members’ belief that saving energy helps the environment—play a critical role in promoting energy conservation.

Brain networks are characterized by nodes and hubs that determine information flow within and between areas. Bertolero et al. show that task-driven changes to hub and node connectivity increase modularity and improve cognitive performance.

A seven-week school-based field experiment shows that social-rewards schemes increase physical activity in preadolescents, with girls being more receptive to reciprocal and boys to team rewarding schemes.