Volume 7 Issue 5, May 2023

An analysis of 2,500 public-health claims reveals that organizations rarely communicate uncertainties around the benefits of behavioural change. To be ethical, public-health communication should be accurate and transparent.

‘Big team’ science challenges researchers to revisit three issues around authorship: (1) how to define authorship-worthy contributions, (2) how contributions should be documented and (3) how disagreements among large teams of coauthors should be handled. We propose steps that the community can take to resolve these issues.

At Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, President Erdoğan’s policies and appointments are overturning the long-held liberal values of the institution. In an ongoing struggle of resistance against these actions, the faculty protest daily in the name of academic freedom and university autonomy.

Supernatural beliefs shape how people understand the world, but there is debate regarding how these beliefs relate to the natural or social world. Jackson and colleagues quantitatively analysed the ethnographic record and found evidence that supernatural explanations are more commonly used for natural than for social phenomena.

A century of experiments on human visual memory have catalogued the many determinants of what people remember about their visual environments. In a massive experimental study of visual memory, Huang leverages mobile gaming to collect a dataset of 35 million behavioural responses that reveals how the mechanisms of visual spatial memory fit together.

One of the reasons that people perform poorly when trying to detect deception is the difficulty of integrating multiple cues into a binary judgement. A simple heuristic of only judging the level of detail in the message consistently allowed people to discriminate lies from truths.

Semantic representations enable humans to identify stimuli. We illustrate that the organization of semantic representations is in part shaped by psychological needs: people who are averse to uncertainty have more-differentiated and separable semantic representations than individuals who are tolerant of uncertainty, and this separation predicts improved discrimination but poorer generalization.

Polygenic indices (PGIs) are increasingly advocated as screening tools for personalized medicine and education. We find, however, that rankings of individuals in PGI distributions for cardiovascular disease and education created with different construction methods and discovery samples are highly unstable. Hence, current PGIs lack the desired precision to be used routinely for personalized intervention.

Leveraging multiple datasets (surveys, web search trends and mobility), Huang et al. document how anti-Chinese rhetoric led to blame sentiment and consumer discrimination against Asian American businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a preregistered experiment, participants were randomly assigned to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that this endorsement affected polarized trust in scientific expertise and caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters.

Humans use supernatural beliefs as tools for explanation. These explanations are more likely to focus on natural phenomena than social phenomena, according to this quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 societies.

How can we help people tell truth and lies apart? Verschuere et al. find that a simple heuristic that instructs people to use only the level of detail in a message, and nothing else, increases deception detection rates.

Using a large dataset of human memory for patterns, Liqiang Huang builds an overarching model of mechanisms of spatial working memory.

Temporally ordered, anatomically distributed and joint neural encoding of linguistic features reveals a cumulative mapping of sound to meaning, providing empirical evidence for validating neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic models of spoken word recognition.

Qasim et al. examine how emotion affects memory using direct brain recording and deep brain stimulation.

Vives et al. show that uncertainty-averse individuals represent semantic concepts in a more separated form at both psychological and neural levels. As a consequence, uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit reduced semantic interference but also poorer generalization.

Partners are often similar in traits, such as their education and political views, but it is unclear what exactly causes this similarity. Using Mendelian randomization and data on 50,000 partner pairs, the authors show that similarity in different traits can be explained by partner choice, confounding factors and convergence over time.

Mathieson et al. carried out a genome-wide association study of reproductive success (number of children born) in humans, revealing the importance of diverse neuro-endocrine and behavioural factors.

Muslimova et al. examine polygenic indices (PGIs) for cardiovascular disease and education and find unstable rankings across PGIs. Rank concordance is driven by discovery sample size and is linked to the explained variance of PGIs.

Examining real-world data that tested different headlines for the same news story on real news readers, Robertson et al. find that people are more likely to click on a headline when it contains negative words compared to positive words.