Volume 4 Issue 3, March 2020

This paper calls for actors working to end violence against children to situate online violence within the broader violence against children agenda. This requires a common conceptual framework that addresses violence in all areas of children’s lives, improved data collection efforts and integrated implementation guidance for prevention.

There is a longstanding debate about whether culture shapes regimes or regimes shape culture. New research by Ruck et al. resolves the debate in favor of culture’s causal primacy.

Conveying an impression of competence is important for jobseekers and politicians alike. New work from Oh, Shafir and Todorov suggests that subtle differences in clothing shape our impressions of how competent people are. In particular, subtly richer-looking clothes elicit greater perceived competence.

Many decisions in life involve deliberating about trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. Bulley and Schacter argue that the mechanisms of prospection and metacognition are integral to deliberation in intertemporal choice.

Balland et al. use data on scientific papers, patents, employment and GDP for 353 metropolitan areas in the United States to show that economic complexity drives the spatial concentration of productive activities in large cities.

Using administrative data on 4 million citizens from two nations, Richmond-Rakerd et al. find that multiple health and social problems cluster in a population segment with low workforce readiness, including low education and poor early-life mental health.

Scholars have long disagreed about how best to achieve stable national democracy. Ruck et al. show that democratization follows from an intergenerational build-up of democratic cultural values, without which democracy is liable to fail.

Van de Vliert finds that differentiation between ingroups and outgroups co-varies with latitude, but not longitude. Differentiation is highest closer to the equator, and this pattern may be explained by ecological conditions in tropical regions.

Lees and Cikara show a negativity bias in group meta-perceptions—how we believe ‘they’ see ‘our’ behaviour—demonstrate how such inaccurate, pessimistic beliefs exacerbate intergroup conflict; and they provide an avenue for reducing the negative effects of inaccuracy.

Subtle economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces even when perceivers are warned that such cues are non-informative or are instructed and incentivized to ignore them. This bias puts low-income individuals at a disadvantage.

Li et al. show that human value-based decision-making can be modelled using the quantum reinforcement learning framework. These new models reveal the importance of the medial frontal cortex in this quantum-like decision-making process.

Matoba et al. performed GWAS on 13 dietary habits in Japanese individuals, identifying ten new associations in eight traits and five dietary-trait-associated loci with pleiotropic effects on multiple human disease and clinical measurements.

This Resource introduces a new public database that enables researchers to re-analyse a large corpus of studies into meta-cognitive confidence judgements.