Volume 2 Issue 2, February 2018

In his capacity as immediate past president of the Federation of Associations of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Jeremy Wolfe interviews Mike Lauer about the new NIH clinical trials policy. Mike Lauer is NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, serving as the principal scientific leader and advisor to the NIH director on the extramural research programme.

The recently updated US National Institutes of Health clinical trials policies will apply broadly to studies involving experimental manipulations of humans. These studies will require registration and reporting in ClinicalTrials.gov, grant application submission under a clinical trials funding opportunity announcement, and Good Clinical Practice training for investigators.

The National Institutes of Health has broadened its definition and changed the reporting requirements for ‘clinical trials’. What are the implications for basic human behavioural and brain science?

Identity formation is an important developmental process during adolescence, with several applied and public health implications. To prevent identity development from going astray, educational efforts, prevention programmes and policy initiatives are needed that help young people develop a healthy sense of identity.

How social norms evolve over time and what affects their evolution are central questions in the literature about norms. A study suggests that over time, hygiene and violence norms have become stricter, because those who prefer strict norms sanction those who prefer loose norms more than sanctioning in the other direction.

With just a handful of modifications to their social networks, individuals and groups can reduce the likelihood that they will be detected by others using standard social network analysis algorithms.

The authors exploit a 1972 policy that increased the minimum school leaving age to investigate the causal effects of staying in school on health. Using a large dataset, they find that remaining in school reduces the risk of diabetes and mortality.

The collective wisdom of crowds often provides better answers to problems than individual judgements. Here, a large experiment that split a crowd into many small deliberative groups produced better estimates than the average of all answers in the crowd.

In two neuroimaging studies, Nam et al. find that amygdala volume is associated with individual preferences to maintain (versus change) the societal status quo.

Waniek and colleagues show that individuals and communities can disguise themselves from detection online by standard social network analysis tools through simple changes to their social network connections.

Strimling and colleagues develop and empirically test a mathematical model of the 'civilizing process', that is, the tendency of social norms about violence and hygiene to become increasingly strict over time.

The authors used graph signal processing to examine whether fMRI signals correspond to underlying anatomical networks. They found that alignment between functional signals and anatomical structure was associated with greater cognitive flexibility.