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| Open AccessAcute hunger does not always undermine prosociality
Previous studies have suggested that being hungry causes people to make more selfish and less prosocial decisions. Here, the authors carried out a series of studies to test this claim and found that the effect of acute hunger was very weak at best.
- Jan A. Häusser
- , Christina Stahlecker
- & Nadira S. Faber
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| Open AccessMotivating actions to mitigate plastic pollution
Plastic pollution is a purely anthropogenic problem and cannot be solved without large-scale human action. Motivating mitigation actions requires more realistic assumptions about human decision-making based on empirical evidence from the behavioural sciences enabling the design of more effective interventions.
- Lili Jia
- , Steve Evans
- & Sander van der Linden
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| Open AccessExamining charitable giving in real-world online donations
Questions related to human altruism are often studied through self-reported behavior or by measuring behavior in laboratory experiments. Here, the authors examine real-world prosocial behavior using charitable donations made online.
- Matthew R. Sisco
- & Elke U. Weber
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| Open AccessBounded rationality in C. elegans is explained by circuit-specific normalization in chemosensory pathways
Innate odor preferences in C. elegans are controlled by the activation of a pair of olfactory sensory neurons. Here, the authors show that asymmetric activation of the AWCON and AWCOFF neurons can lead to irrational olfactory preferences that are explained by a model of normalization of sensory gain control.
- Dror Cohen
- , Guy Teichman
- & Oded Rechavi
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Article
| Open AccessIntroducing risk inequality metrics in tuberculosis policy development
Failure to account for heterogeneity in TB risk can mislead model-based evaluation of proposed interventions. Here, the authors introduce a metric to estimate the distribution of risk in populations from routinely collected data and find that variation in infection acquisition is the most impactful.
- M. Gabriela M. Gomes
- , Juliane F. Oliveira
- & Christian Lienhardt
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| Open AccessOptimizing the conservation of migratory species over their full annual cycle
Conservation decisions to protect land used by migratory birds rely on understanding species’ dynamic habitat associations. Here the authors identify conservation scenarios needed to maintain >30% of the abundances of 117 migratory birds across the Americas, considering spatial and temporal patterns of species abundance.
- Richard Schuster
- , Scott Wilson
- & Joseph. R. Bennett
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Article
| Open AccessForming global estimates of self-performance from local confidence
Human confidence tracks current performance, but little is known about the formation of ‘global’ self-performance estimates over longer timescales. Here, the authors show that people use local confidence to form global estimates, but tend to underestimate their performance when feedback is absent.
- Marion Rouault
- , Peter Dayan
- & Stephen M. Fleming
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Article
| Open AccessResource sharing in technologically defined social networks
Resource sharing over peer-to-peer technological networks is emerging as economically important, yet little is known about how people choose to share in this context. Here, the authors introduce a new game to model sharing, and test how players form sharing strategies depending on technological constraints.
- Hirokazu Shirado
- , George Iosifidis
- & Nicholas A. Christakis
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| Open AccessThe importance of cognitive diversity for sustaining the commons
Social intelligence and general intelligence are two distinct cognitive abilities. Here, the authors show that groups of people with high competency in both social and general intelligence perform better in a resource-management task involving cooperation, and adjustment to unexpected ecological change.
- Jacopo A. Baggio
- , Jacob Freeman
- & David Pillow
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| Open AccessThe rise and fall of cooperation through reputation and group polarization
Group membership can inform individuals’ decisions on whether to cooperate. Here, the authors show how cooperative groups themselves can emerge and change due to use of reputation heuristics (such as “the enemy of a friend is an enemy”), and how this destabilizes cooperation over time.
- Jörg Gross
- & Carsten K. W. De Dreu
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| Open AccessPractice and perspectives in the validation of resource management models
Credibility of long-term projection in quantitative models is continuously under debate and they rely on validation to prove projection accuracy. Here the authors investigated the views on the validation approaches and they show that empirical data plays an important role in the validation practice in all main areas of sustainability science.
- Sibel Eker
- , Elena Rovenskaya
- & Simon Langan
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Article
| Open AccessEarly childhood investment impacts social decision-making four decades later
Early childhood educational intervention has positive outcomes in adulthood, including higher education attainment, economic status, and overall health. This study shows that adults who underwent such intervention have greater enforcement of equality norm during social decision-making, potentially motivated by future planning.
- Yi Luo
- , Sébastien Hétu
- & Craig Ramey
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Article
| Open AccessClosing the gender gap in competitiveness through priming
Men are often more willing to compete compared to women, which may contribute to gender differences in wages and career advancement. Here, the authors show that ‘power priming’ - encouraging people to imagine themselves in a situation of power - can close the gender gap in competitiveness.
- Loukas Balafoutas
- , Helena Fornwagner
- & Matthias Sutter
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| Open AccessBiased sequential sampling underlies the effects of time pressure and delay in social decision making
It has been proposed that humans make unselfish decisions if constrained to decide quickly, but other research has suggested that time constraint makes us selfish. Here, the authors reconcile these two views showing that pro-social people become more pro-social under time pressure, but selfish subjects do the opposite.
- Fadong Chen
- & Ian Krajbich
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| Open AccessHeuristic and optimal policy computations in the human brain during sequential decision-making
Alhough humans often make a series of related decisions, it is unknown whether this is done by relying on optimal or heuristic strategies. Here, the authors show that humans rely on both the best heuristic and the optimal policy, and that these strategies are controlled by parts of the medial prefrontal cortex.
- Christoph W. Korn
- & Dominik R. Bach
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| Open AccessCooperating with machines
Artificial intelligence is now superior to humans in many fully competitive games, such as Chess, Go, and Poker. Here the authors develop a machine-learning algorithm that can cooperate effectively with humans when cooperation is beneficial but nontrivial, something humans are remarkably good at.
- Jacob W. Crandall
- , Mayada Oudah
- & Iyad Rahwan
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| Open AccessPan-Antarctic analysis aggregating spatial estimates of Adélie penguin abundance reveals robust dynamics despite stochastic noise
Adélie penguins are a key Antarctic indicator species, but data patchiness has challenged efforts to link population dynamics to key drivers. Che-Castaldo et al. resolve this issue using a pan-Antarctic Bayesian model to infer missing data, and show that spatial aggregation leads to more robust inference regarding dynamics.
- Christian Che-Castaldo
- , Stephanie Jenouvrier
- & Heather J. Lynch
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| Open AccessPeer punishment promotes enforcement of bad social norms
Punishment by peers can enforce social norms, such as contributing to a public good. Here, Abbink and colleagues show that individuals will enforce norms even when contributions reduce the net benefit of the group, resulting in the maintenance of wasteful contributions.
- Klaus Abbink
- , Lata Gangadharan
- & John Thrasher
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Article |
Group performance is maximized by hierarchical competence distribution
Social groups often need to take decisions and solve problems together, with each member contributing to the solution in a different way. Zafeiris et al.provide a family of models that allow the definition of the ideal distribution of competences in a group to solve a given task.
- Anna Zafeiris
- & Tamás Vicsek