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Previous research has shown that patients are reluctant to use medical artificial intelligence (AI). Cadario et al. find that this reluctance is due to people perceiving algorithms as a ‘black box’, coupled with an illusory sense of understanding medical decisions made by humans. Brief interventions that target subjective understanding of medical AI increase people’s willingness to use it.
Retractions are a key tool for maintaining the integrity of the published record. We need to recognize and reward researchers, especially early-career researchers, who do the right thing in coming forward with a request to retract research that cannot be relied upon due to honest error.
Discovering an error that leads to retraction is a harrowing experience, especially for early-career researchers. Joana Grave shares the story of the retraction of her first published paper and how community support helped her through this challenge.
Subjective experience of the topic of study can bring passion and creativity to cognitive research. Micah Allen describes this as a double-edged sword, as he recalls witnessing how subjective feeling overrode hard data. But there are ways in which researchers can benefit from subjectively informed research, while guarding against its pitfalls.
COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy amongst Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups has recently been well observed, and is symptomatic of wider health inequalities. An approach that unites insights from sociology and medicine is the only way to address this pressing issue.
Scientific progress depends on researchers updating their beliefs when new evidence arises. McDiarmid and colleagues show that psychologists adjust their beliefs after seeing new results from a replication project. While updating is less than a Bayesian model would justify, it is not undermined by personal investment.
A key question in human evolutionary genetics is whether and how natural selection has shaped the human genome. A new study by Song and colleagues uses GWAS data to examine evidence for the effects of polygenic adaptation in complex traits at different time scales.
Although intellectual humility is a prerequisite for credible science, it is rarely practised. Hoekstra and Vazire make recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the crucial role of peer reviewers in promoting intellectually humble manuscripts.
The coming years are likely to see slowing economic growth, which has significant consequences for developed democracies. This Perspective by Burgess et al. considers the implications of slowed growth and proposes a guided civic revival approach to addressing challenges.
Small et al. estimate travel times to the nearest bank or alternative financial institution from every block in 19 of the largest cities in the United States and demonstrate that neighbourhood racial and ethnic characteristics strongly predict access to conventional banking.
Burton et al. probe the question of moral contagion through out-of-sample prediction, model comparisons and specification curve analyses, demonstrating the limitations of conclusions based on large-scale, observational social media datasets alone.
Cadario et al. identify potential reasons underlying the resistance to use medical artificial intelligence and test interventions to overcome this resistance.
In this micro-society study, Osiurak et al. show that the improvement of a physical system over generations is accompanied by an increased understanding of it, showing the role of technical reasoning in cumulative technological culture.
The political views of racial minorities vary. By analysing political speech, tweets and written introductions, Dupree finds that, in mostly white settings, Black and Latinx conservatives referenced high competence more than liberals, reversing stereotypes.
McDiarmid and colleagues show that psychologists update their beliefs about effect sizes after learning about new evidence from replication studies, although not as much as predicted by a rational Bayesian model.
Denison and colleagues present a computational account of attention—temporal dynamic normalization—which extends the idea of limited attentional resources across space at a single moment to a formal account of limited resources across time at a single location.
Nordt et al. show in a longitudinal MRI study in children that face- and word-selective regions expand in development and become more category selective while limb-selective regions shrink and become less selective.
Sullivan and Huettel present the multi-attribute, time-dependent drift diffusion model, a version of the drift diffusion model for multi-attribute choice. In the model, each attribute begins to influence the decision process at distinct times, fitting food choices affected by healthiness and taste.
Which brain circuits are causally involved in depression? Using the human connectome as a wiring diagram, Siddiqi et al. combine data from lesions, deep brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies to show that these three methods converge in identifying a single depression circuit.
This genome-wide study of age at first sexual intercourse and first birth identifies 371 signals driven by reproductive biology, externalising behaviour and environmental effects, with later onset associated with lower incidence of some diseases.
Song et al. quantify the signal of natural selection on 870 complex traits in European individuals, finding that 88% of traits showed signals of selection in the past 3,000 years, including traits related to pigmentation, body shape and food intake.
Benjamin et al. construct polygenic indexes (DNA-based predictors) for 47 phenotypes and make them available to researchers in 11 datasets. They also present a theoretical framework and estimator to help interpret analyses using polygenic indexes.