Volume 6 Issue 7, July 2022

Being the first in her family to graduate from university, Charisma Hehakaya discusses how academic institutions can help first-generation students to thrive.

Although large-scale data are increasingly used to study human behaviour, researchers now recognize their limits for producing sound social science. Qualitative research can prevent some of these problems. Such methods can help to understand data quality, inform design and analysis decisions and guide interpretation of results.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) already exist in several countries, with many more on the way. But although CBDCs can promote financial inclusivity by offering convenience and low transaction costs, their adoption must not lead to the loss of privacy and erosion of civil liberties.

Failure to consider the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion in biomedical and human behaviour research harms patients, trainees and scientists. On the basis of experience and evidence, we make actionable, specific recommendations on how equity, diversity and inclusion can be considered at each step of a research project.

A randomized controlled trial of approximately 4,500 households in Botswana during the COVID-19 pandemic was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using low-tech learning interventions during school closures. A simple combination of phone tutoring and SMS messages substantially improved learning in primary school children in a cost-effective manner.

Gomez et al. study international citation and text similarity networks across 150 fields and find that some countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and China, increasingly receive more citations despite researching similar topics as others.

Singh and Garfield studied 444 transgressions among the Mentawai (Indonesia) and find evidence of third-party mediation but not punishment. They suggest that, for the Mentawai, penalties serve to restore cooperation more than enforce norms.

A randomized trial in Botswana during COVID-19 provides evidence of effective distance education using ‘low-tech’ mobile phone approaches when school is disrupted. Weekly phone tutoring and SMS messages improved learning cost-effectively.

Lee and collaborators demonstrate, across a number of surveys and experiments, that distaste for the out-party (negative partisanship) is not substantially more prevalent than in-party attachment (positive partisanship).

In an individual-participant meta-analysis, including intensive longitudinal studies, Kuehn et al. find support for the hypothesis that self-injurious thoughts and behaviours are negatively reinforced by relief from negative affect.

Grand, Blank, et al. show that context-dependent knowledge about objects, such as the similarities between animals in terms of size versus danger versus habitat, can be recovered from word embeddings via a simple, interpretable geometrical operation.

Glickman et al. identify an evidence integration bias whereby the relative weighting of incoming information towards a decision is increased based on its consistency with preceding evidence, resulting in a pre-decision confirmation bias.

Senoussi et al. present modelling, behavioural and neural evidence that frontal theta oscillations (4–7 Hz) shift their peak frequency in response to task demands to support flexible task implementation.

Won et al. compare genetic associations with subjective well-being in Korean and European populations, and show significant cross-population genetic correlations