Psychology

Vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals across cultures.

A multi-ancestry meta-regression study analyses diverse genome-wide association studies and genome loci associated with tobacco and alcohol use.

Genetic data for 13 Neanderthals from 2 Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia presented provide insights into the social organization of an isolated Neanderthal community at the easternmost extent of their known range.

An online training module that synergistically targets two different mindsets can reduce stress levels in adolescents in the context of social-evaluative stressors—stressful experiences in which individuals fear that others are judging them negatively.

Correcting public misperceptions about the views of doctors on the COVID-19 vaccines can have lasting impacts on public uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Strategically perceiving and conceiving problems facilitates the effective use of limited cognitive resources.

Videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas, but videoconferencing groups are as effective as (or perhaps even more effective than) in-person groups at deciding which ideas to pursue.

Psychosocial measures improve the cost-effectiveness of multi-faceted interventions against extreme poverty.

An analysis of spatial navigation in nearly 400,000 people shows, by measuring their performance in a video game, that individuals who grew up outside cities are better at navigation than those who grew up in cities.

Human genetic variants that impair genes that are intolerant of damaging genetic variation are associated with lower reproductive success that is probably mediated by genetically associated cognitive and behavioural traits, particularly in males.

Combined data from three large studies, with a total sample size of around 50,000 individuals, indicate that many previous studies linking the brain to complex phenotypes have been statistically underpowered, producing inflated and irreproducible effects.

When people learn more about a stranger, they think a stranger knows more about them, and when tested in a field experiment, this shifted residents’ perceptions of police officers’ knowledge of illegal activity.

A massive field study whereby many different treatments are tested synchronously in one large sample using a common objectively measured outcome, termed a megastudy, was performed to examine the ability of interventions to increase gym attendance by American adults.

A theory of motor learning based on the principle of contextual inference reveals that adaptation can arise by both creating and updating memories and changing how existing memories are differentially expressed, and predicts evoked recovery and context-dependent single-trial learning.

Data collected from crisis helplines during the COVID-19 pandemic show that pandemic-related issues replaced rather than exacerbated underlying anxieties, and demonstrate that helpline data are useful indicators of public mental health.

Two randomized controlled trials demonstrate the ability of text-based behavioural ‘nudges’ to improve the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, especially when designed to make participants feel ownership over their vaccine dose.

The ability of people to understand the thoughts and actions of others—known as social sensing—can be combined with computational social science to advance research into human sociality.

Observational and experimental studies of people seeking to improve objects, ideas or situations demonstrate that people default to searching for solutions that add new components rather than for solutions that remove existing components.

Surveys and a field experiment with Twitter users show that prompting people to think about the accuracy of news sources increases the quality of the news that they share online.

In real-world spatial navigation and observation tasks, oscillatory activity in the human brain encodes representations of self and others, with oscillatory power increasing at locations near the boundaries of the room.

An analysis of 16 types of facial expression in thousands of contexts in millions of videos revealed fine-grained patterns in human facial expression that are preserved across the modern world.

Lapses in attention before remembering partially account for why we remember or forget in the moment, why some individuals remember better than others, and why heavier media multitasking is related to worse memory.

Local exposure to inequality in low-income areas is positively associated with support for a tax on wealthier individuals to address economic disparities.

The results obtained by seventy different teams analysing the same functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset show substantial variation, highlighting the influence of analytical choices and the importance of sharing workflows publicly and performing multiple analyses.

In contrast to a previous study in which only bankers showed increased dishonesty when reminded of their profession, this study found that such reminders induced some dishonesty in bankers, although the effect was not significant, and that this effect was not unique to bankers.

A US national experiment showed that a short, online, self-administered growth mindset intervention can increase adolescents’ grades and advanced course-taking, and identified the types of school that were poised to benefit the most.

A Review of advances in memory-editing techniques in humans suggests that these techniques are advancing beyond science fiction and could hold promise for translation into clinical practice.

Understanding the behaviour of the machines powered by artificial intelligence that increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic and political interactions is essential to our ability to control the actions of these intelligent machines, reap their benefits and minimize their harms.

A field study and three experiments demonstrate that people who engage in rare (non-normative) prosocial behaviours will be more effective advocates for those behaviours than people who merely praise the virtues of these prosocial behaviours.

Responses from more than two million people to an internet-based survey of attitudes towards moral dilemmas that might be faced by autonomous vehicles shed light on similarities and variations in ethical preferences among different populations.

Tools are embodied by the human somatosensory system, serving as sensory extensions of the human body.

Using estimates of metabolic costs of the brain and body, mathematical predictions suggest that the evolution of adult Homo sapiens-sized brains and bodies is driven by ecological rather than social challenges and is perhaps strongly promoted by culture.

Insights into windows of opportunity that will have strong positive impacts on the trajectories of health, education, social and economic success of adolescents are reviewed.

A networked colour coordination game, with humans interacting with autonomous software bots, shows that bots acting with small levels of random noise and being placed centrally in the network improves not only human–bot interactions but also human–human interactions at distant nodes.

The wisdom of the crowd can be improved by using an algorithm that selects the answer that is more popular than people predict, rather than the answer that is most popular.

A review into the complex effects of Δ⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol on the dopamine system, examining data from animal and human studies and discussing the necessary future direction of research.

A native Amazonian society rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant, whereas Bolivian city- and town-dwellers preferred consonance, indicating that preference for consonance over dissonance is not universal and probably develops from exposure to particular types of polyphonic music.

Phylogenetic methods were applied to a cross-cultural database of traditional Austronesian societies to test the link between ritual human sacrifice and the origins of social hierarchy—the presence of sacrifice in a society stabilized social stratification and promoted inherited class systems.

To test whether there is a relationship between the level of national corruption and the intrinsic honesty of individuals, a behavioural test of the honesty of people from 23 countries was conducted; the authors found that high national scores on an index of rule-breaking are linked with reduced personal honesty.

In human societies, individuals who violate social norms may be punished by third-party observers who have not been harmed by the violator; this study suggests that a reason why the observers are willing to punish is to be seen as more trustworthy by the community.

Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists.

An analysis of when children develop a sense of fairness (receiving less or more than a peer) is compared across seven different societies; aversion to receiving less emerges early in childhood in all societies, whereas aversion to receiving more emerges later in childhood and only in three of the seven societies studied.

Initially weak episodic memories in humans can be selectively enhanced and consolidated following later emotional learning involving conceptually related information, suggesting a mechanism for how we can remember initially inconsequential information after a relevant later experience.

Many factors have been proposed as contributors to risk of alcohol abuse, but quantifying their influence has been difficult; here a longitudinal study of a large sample of adolescents and machine learning are used to generate models of predictors of current and future alcohol abuse, assessing the relative contribution of many factors, including life history, individual personality differences, brain structure and genotype.

A mathematical modelling study assesses the role of peer behaviour and ‘herding’ behaviour in aggregating information through the peer-review process; peer review works best when reviewers exercise intermediate levels of subjectivity.

A prospective longitudinal study identifies the earliest known indicator of social disability in human infancy: decline in attention to others’ eyes in infants who are later diagnosed with autism; the decline is evident already within the first 2 to 6 months of life, which reveals the early unfolding of the disorder but also offers a promising opportunity for the future of early intervention.