Volume 4 Issue 11, November 2020

Social and behavioural scientists have attempted to speak to the COVID-19 crisis. But is behavioural research on COVID-19 suitable for making policy decisions? We offer a taxonomy that lets our science advance in ‘evidence readiness levels’ to be suitable for policy. We caution practitioners to take extreme care translating our findings to applications.

The impact of pandemics is magnified by the coexistence of two contradicting reactions to rare dire risks: panic and the ‘it won’t happen to me’ effect that hastens spread of the disease. We review research that clarifies the conditions that trigger the two biases, and we highlight the potential of gentle rule enforcement policies that can address these problematic conditions.

Probabilistic mixture models have contributed significantly to advancements in visual working memory research in recent decades. In a new paper, Schurgin and colleagues revisit the basic assumptions of mixture models and suggest that we cannot understand memory without first considering perception.

From aardvark to zyzzyva, the world we live in is rich and complex. How is this diversity of objects represented in the human mind? Through an experimental and computational tour de force, Hebart et al. show that people share a mental representation of objects based on a small number of meaningful dimensions.

Lorenz-Spreen et al. argue that effective web governance is needed to empower individuals online. They describe two classes of behavioural interventions—nudging and boosting— that can help redesign online environments for informed and autonomous choice

Dubois and colleagues describe how a testable framework for personality research, delineating personality’s causal and constitutive relations with genes, environment, brain, mind and behaviour will benefit the field.

Maarten van Ham et al. track changes in the social geography of New York City, London and Tokyo. They find that the workforces are professionalizing. High income earners are concentrating in the city centres, whereas poverty is suburbanizing.

Götz et al. find that topography is related to personality across the United States (n = 3,387,014), with people in mountainous areas being less agreeable, extraverted, neurotic and conscientious but more open. East–west comparisons suggest frontier cultural heritage and ecological demands as possible mechanisms.

Steyvers and Schafer analysed the latent structure of learning trajectories on a cognitive training platform. The results reveal covariation in cognitive performance across tasks, offering predictive tools for cognitive performance.

Schurgin et al. propose a model of visual memory, arguing against a distinction between how many items are represented and how precisely they are represented, and in favour of a view based on continuous representations in noisy channels.

Hebart et al. developed a computational model of similarity judgements for 1,854 natural objects. The model accurately predicted similarity and revealed 49 interpretable dimensions that reflect both perceptual and conceptual object properties.

Gollwitzer et al. use smartphone mobility tracking to show that US county support for Trump in 2016 was associated with a lower reduction in mobility in March–May 2020, which in turn was associated with higher COVID-19 infection and fatality growth rates in pro-Trump counties.

Zhou, Pei et al. develop a more realistic information cascade model that reproduces key structures of real-world diffusion trees in distinct social platforms by combining a peer-to-peer diffusion pattern with a correction for observational bias.

Specification curve analysis enables large numbers of alternative empirical analyses to be performed on the same data, showcasing how analytical decisions influence results and allowing joint inference over all analyses.