Volume 7 Issue 1, January 2023

In Iran, women and men protest day and night for women, life and liberty. The moment has come for the international academic community to take action to remove the obstacles faced by Iran’s scholarly community, and join the call for equality, democracy and human rights.

Trophy hunting remains a high-octane debate for scholars and actors at various levels, including governments, lobbies, supranational bodies, local communities and broader publics. These actors are often driven by a range of competing interests. Bridging the divides will require collaboration and a focus on shared goals.

Registration has been proposed as a possible solution to the reproducibility crisis in scientific research. In its more than 20 years of practice in biomedical research, registration has been valuable — but it is still largely limited to clinical trials, and its implementation is still largely inconsistent.

Non-random mating affects the genetic makeup of populations and challenges the validity of popular genetics methods. A new study explores the unique patterns of non-random mating in the Japanese population and underscores the importance of large-scale genetic studies outside European-descended groups.

Biased research is wasteful, undermines the credibility of science and prevents cumulative knowledge. Hardwicke and Wagenmakers explain how preregistration, when carefully and transparently used, can help to reduce bias.

Leveraging data from a longitudinal field experiment, Taylor and colleagues show that identity cues, such as a username, increase how viewers vote and reply to online content. Their results support a rich-get-richer dynamic when identity cues are salient.

Phylogenetic methods applied to ethnographic data show that systems of religious and political authority have worked synergistically over millennia of Austronesian cultural evolution, without showing a clear tendency to become more or less distinct.

Across five studies, Spadaro et al. show that perceiving representatives of institutions as corrupt is associated with lower interpersonal trust and prosocial behaviour among strangers.

Voelkel et al. find that two interventions designed to reduce affective polarization do not also significantly reduce anti-democratic attitudes.

Yamamoto et al. find genetic evidence of assortative mating based on dietary habits and disease phenotypes in the Japanese population, and show that this pattern of partner choice is markedly different from its European-ancestry counterpart.

This systematic review on digital media and democracy finds beneficial relationships mostly in emerging democracies but detrimental associations in established democracies for different political variables across methods.

Fan et al. show that trait somatic anxiety is associated with reduced tendency for exploration, including being less likely to choose an uncertain option.

This meta-analysis examines different features of infant-directed speech across languages and infant ages. The results suggest that there are cross-linguistic tendencies and that caregivers adjust the properties of infant-directed speech to suit infants’ changing needs.

This paper uses historical folklore to show that a society’s degree of market interactions is strongly associated with the cultural salience of prosocial behaviour, interpersonal trust, universalist moral values, and emotions of guilt and shame.

Boundy-Singer and the team studied how people’s confidence can predict the accuracy of their decisions. They found that confidence estimates reflect decision reliability, not accuracy, and that the uncertainty about stimulus uncertainty limits the quality of confidence judgments.