Volume 2 Issue 3, March 2018

Why isn’t there a strong relation between income and happiness? Why do people avoid or seek self-confirmatory or even false information? Why do they play the lottery and buy insurance? Taking account of belief-based utility can enable economics to make sense of these and a multitude of other puzzling phenomena.

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to P ≤ 0.005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

Asymmetric social boundaries allow a minority culture to reap the benefits of outside interaction while maintaining its distinctiveness. This opens questions about the nature of intergroup interactions and whether such boundaries are the only way to preserve valued cultural norms.

Male antisocial behaviour peaks in adolescence and declines later in life. Moffitt reviews recent evidence in support of the hypothesis that the age–crime curve conceals two groups of individuals with different causes.

Galesic et al. show that election poll questions that ask participants about the voting intentions of their social contacts, in addition to their own intentions, improve predictions of voting in the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections.

The authors use a computational data-driven approach to study the determinants of conscious processing of human faces. They show that the speed at which a face reaches conscious awareness depends on its perceived power or dominance.

Using fMRI data from healthy controls, the authors construct probabilistic maps of the multiple-demand and language-selective regions in the brain to classify patient lesions. They find that only multiple-demand-weighted lesion volumes predict deficits in fluid intelligence.

A model of minority–majority group interactions shows that minority cultural practices can be preserved from cultural homogenization where a group boundary allows free movement of minority members, but excludes members of the more powerful majority.

Glaze et al. show that individual variability in learning from noisy evidence involves a bias–variance trade-off that is best explained by a model using a sampling algorithm that approximates optimal inference.

Using an imagery-perception paradigm, the authors find that imagined speech affects the perceived loudness of sound. They also show that early neural responses correlate with the loudness ratings, even without external stimulation.