Social sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is often tempting for social media users to present themselves in an idealized way. Here, based on analyses of a large set of Facebook profiles together with a longitudinal experiment, the authors find evidence that more authentic self-expression may be psychologically beneficial, as it is related to greater well-being.

    • Erica R. Bailey
    • , Sandra C. Matz
    •  & Sheena S. Iyengar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors estimate the damages associated with global temperature variability. They find that variability in temperature leads to substantial uncertainty about damages, which imposes costs equivalent to a large fraction of annual consumption today.

    • Raphael Calel
    • , Sandra C. Chapman
    •  & Nicholas W. Watkins

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most driver models were designed for specific scenario. Here, the authors developed a driver behaviour model that can be applied to multiple scenarios and show that human-like driving behaviour emerges when the Driver’s Risk Field is coupled to a controller that maintains the perceived risk below a threshold level.

    • Sarvesh Kolekar
    • , Joost de Winter
    •  & David Abbink

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dynamic pricing schemes are increasingly employed in on-demand mobility. Here the authors show that ride-hailing services across the globe exhibit anomalous price surges induced by collective action of drivers, uncovered from price time-series at 137 locations, and explain under which conditions they emerge.

    • Malte Schröder
    • , David-Maximilian Storch
    •  & Marc Timme

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are able to exploit patterns or schemas when performing new tasks, but the mechanism for this ability is still unknown. Using graph-learning tasks, we show that humans are able to transfer abstract structural knowledge and suggest a computational mechanism by which such transfer can occur.

    • Shirley Mark
    • , Rani Moran
    •  & Timothy E. J. Behrens

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Accounting guidelines exist for carbon flows in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems, but not shelf sea sediments. In this Review, the authors explore whether effective management of carbon stocks accumulating in shelf seas could contribute to a nation’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.

    • Tiziana Luisetti
    • , Silvia Ferrini
    •  & Emmanouil Tyllianakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Having a rich negative emotion vocabulary is assumed to help cope with adversity. Here, the authors show that emotion vocabularies simply mirror life experiences, with richer negative emotion vocabularies reflecting lower mental health, and richer positive emotion vocabularies reflecting higher mental health.

    • Vera Vine
    • , Ryan L. Boyd
    •  & James W. Pennebaker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The quality of human language translation has been thought to be unattainable by computer translation systems. Here the authors present CUBBITT, a deep learning system that outperforms professional human translators in retaining text meaning in English-to-Czech news translation, and validate the system on English-French and English-Polish language pairs.

    • Martin Popel
    • , Marketa Tomkova
    •  & Zdeněk Žabokrtský

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Climate science and climate economics are critical sources of expertise in our pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals. Effective use of this expertise requires a strengthening of its epistemic foundations and a renewed focus on more practical policy problems.

    • David A. Stainforth
    •  & Raphael Calel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the synchronization of human networks is important in many aspects, but current research is suffering from limited control and noisy environments. Shahal et al. show a quantitative study with full control over the network connectivity, coupling strength and delay among interacting violin players.

    • Shir Shahal
    • , Ateret Wurzberg
    •  & Moti Fridman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The current Syrian conflict is considered a major humanitarian crisis. Here, the authors show a decline in population well-being with the onset of the conflict, and show how this decline compares to other populations experiencing wars, civil unrest or natural disasters.

    • Felix Cheung
    • , Amanda Kube
    •  & Gabriel M. Leung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most evolutionary game theory focuses on isolated games. Here, Donahue et al. present a general framework for ‘multichannel games’ in which individuals engage in a set of parallel games with a partner, and show that such parallel interactions favor the evolution of reciprocity across games.

    • Kate Donahue
    • , Oliver P. Hauser
    •  & Christian Hilbe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forcing people to choose quickly often changes pro-social behavior, but it is unclear why. Here, the authors show that under time pressure, people engage in incomplete information searches biased by concern (or lack thereof) for others, explaining effects often attributed to automatic processing.

    • Yi Yang Teoh
    • , Ziqing Yao
    •  & Cendri A. Hutcherson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eyewitness errors contribute to wrongful convictions. Here, the authors present a lineup procedure that reveals the structure of eyewitness memory, reduces decision bias, and measures performance of individual witnesses.

    • Sergei Gepshtein
    • , Yurong Wang
    •  & Thomas D. Albright

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eye movements are inhibited prior to the occurrence of predictable visual events. Here the authors show that this inhibition is also found in the auditory domain, thus revealing a multimodal perception action coupling.

    • Dekel Abeles
    • , Roy Amit
    •  & Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People regularly punish norm violations using gossip and direct confrontation. Here, the authors show that the use of gossip versus direct confrontation is context sensitive, with confrontation used more when punishers have more to gain, and gossip used more when the costs of retaliation loom large.

    • Catherine Molho
    • , Joshua M. Tybur
    •  & Daniel Balliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People are disproportionately more patient when evaluating larger rewards. Here, the authors show how this magnitude effect may reflect an adaptive response to uncertainty in mental representations of future value.

    • Samuel J. Gershman
    •  & Rahul Bhui

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Current environmental impact mitigation neglects over-consumption from affluent citizens as a primary driver. The authors highlight the role of bottom-up movements to overcome structural economic growth imperatives spurring consumption by changing structures and culture towards safe and just systems.

    • Thomas Wiedmann
    • , Manfred Lenzen
    •  & Julia K. Steinberger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The systemic risk of real-world financial networks is understudied. Here the authors focused on the guarantee network among Chinese firms and found that the global financial crisis during 2007-2008 and economic policies in the aftermath had significant influence on the evolution of guarantee network structure.

    • Yingli Wang
    • , Qingpeng Zhang
    •  & Xiaoguang Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Scholars have long argued for the central role of agency—the size of one’s opportunity set—in the human experience, but there has been little work on how a sense of agency affects behavior. We demonstrate that increasing agency leads to greater patience and risk tolerance, even if these new opportunities are not exercised.

    • Ayelet Gneezy
    • , Alex Imas
    •  & Ania Jaroszewicz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Local participatory experiences can influence broader democratic attitudes and participation. Here, in two field experiments in US and China, the authors find that participatory work meetings led workers to be less authoritarian and more critical about societal authority and justice, and more willing to participate in political and social decision-making.

    • Sherry Jueyu Wu
    •  & Elizabeth Levy Paluck

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is generally difficult to scale derived estimates and understand the accuracy across locations for passively-collected data sources, such as mobile phones and satellite imagery. Here the authors show that their trained deep learning models are able to explain 70% of the variation in ground-measured village wealth in held-out countries, outperforming previous benchmarks from high-resolution imagery with errors comparable to that of existing ground data.

    • Christopher Yeh
    • , Anthony Perez
    •  & Marshall Burke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Seshat database has made it possible to reveal large-scale patterns in human cultural evolution. Here, Shin et al. investigate transitions in social complexity and find alternating thresholds of polity size and information processing required for further sociopolitical development.

    • Jaeweon Shin
    • , Michael Holton Price
    •  & Timothy A. Kohler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There lacks a European cost-benefit analysis of possible protective measures against rising seas. Here the authors used a probabilistic data and modeling framework to estimate costs and benefits of coastal protection measures and found that at least 83% of flood damages could be avoided by dyke improvements along a third of the European coastline.

    • Michalis I. Vousdoukas
    • , Lorenzo Mentaschi
    •  & Luc Feyen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Carbon emission trading is an important market-based policy instrument to reduce GHG emission using reward-punishment mechanism. Here the authors show that the EU emission trading schemes operate at its designed purpose and there is a positive and linear relationship between firm profits and the firms’ efforts in abatement.

    • Jianfeng Guo
    • , Fu Gu
    •  & Ying Fan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The transition to agriculture brought major changes to human populations in Europe during the Neolithic period. Here, Cubas and colleagues analyse lipid residues from Neolithic pottery from along the Atlantic coast of Europe to trace the spread of dairy production and shifts in diet.

    • Miriam Cubas
    • , Alexandre Lucquin
    •  & Oliver E. Craig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the development of human societies is influenced through their ecological environment and climatic conditions has been the subject of intensive debate. Here, the authors present multi-proxy data from southern Scandinavia which suggests that pre-agricultural population growth there was likely influenced by enhanced marine production.

    • J. P. Lewis
    • , D. B. Ryves
    •  & S. Juggins

  • Article
    | Open Access

    European populations underwent strong genetic changes during the Neolithic. Here, Furtwängler et al. provide ancient nuclear and mitochondrial genomic data from the region of Switzerland during the end of the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age that reveal a complex genetic turnover during the arrival of steppe ancestry.

    • Anja Furtwängler
    • , A. B. Rohrlach
    •  & Johannes Krause

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about decentralized institutions that could facilitate cooperation for the sake of future generations. Here, the authors show that allowing for peer punishment within a generation is only partially successful in facilitating cooperation for the sake of later generations.

    • Johannes Lohse
    •  & Israel Waichman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenomena like imitation, herding and positive feedbacks in the complex financial markets characterize the emergence of endogenous instabilities, which however is still understudied. Here the authors show that the graph-based approach is helpful to timely recognize phases of increasing instability that can drive the system to a new market configuration.

    • Alessandro Spelta
    • , Andrea Flori
    •  & Fabio Pammolli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Natural hazards can have huge impacts on individuals and societies, however, monitoring the economic recovery in the aftermath of extreme events remains a challenge. Here, the authors find that Facebook posting activity of small businesses can be used to monitor post-disaster economic recovery, and can allow local governments to better target distribution of resources.

    • Robert Eyre
    • , Flavia De Luca
    •  & Filippo Simini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Evaluating the heat risk among city dwellers is important. Here, the authors assessed the heat risk in Philippine cities using remote sensing data and social-ecological indicators and found that the cities at high or very high risk are found in Metro Manila, where levels of heat hazard and exposure are high.

    • Ronald C. Estoque
    • , Makoto Ooba
    •  & Shogo Nakamura

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chinese government has implemented the air pollution control measure-the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan in 2013, whose effects have not been fully studied. Here the authors show that from 2013 to 2017, the plan has achieved substantial public health benefits.

    • Huanbi Yue
    • , Chunyang He
    •  & Brett A. Bryan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The partial effects of saving rate changes on CO2 emissions remain unclear. Here the authors found that the increase in saving rates of China has led to increments of global industrial CO2 emissions by 189 million tonnes (Mt) during 2007-2012, while global CO2 emissions would be reduced by 186 Mt if the saving rates of China decreased by 15 percentage points.

    • Chen Lin
    • , Jianchuan Qi
    •  & Zhifeng Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Partners who actually reduce global emissions can be penalized under carbon accounting methods based on production or consumption give an idea of responsibility. Here the authors propose a new framework, emission responsibility allotment that penalizes/credits those that increase/decrease global emissions.

    • Erik Dietzenbacher
    • , Ignacio Cazcarro
    •  & Iñaki Arto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are concerns that expansion of marine protected areas could have negative effects on the fishing industry. Here Lynham et al. demonstrate that the expansion of two of the world’s largest protected areas did not have a negative impact on catch rates in the Hawaii longline fishery.

    • John Lynham
    • , Anton Nikolaev
    •  & Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    HIV incidence among sex workers remains high in many settings. Here, the authors utilize individual-level data across ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa and suggest that increasingly punitive and non-protective laws are associated with HIV, and that stigmas and sex work laws may operate jointly in increasing HIV risk.

    • Carrie E. Lyons
    • , Sheree R. Schwartz
    •  & Stefan Baral

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Individuals within social networks rarely observe the network as a whole; rather, their observations are limited to their social circles. Here we show that network structure can distort observations, making a trait appear far more common within many social circles than it is in the network as a whole.

    • Nazanin Alipourfard
    • , Buddhika Nettasinghe
    •  & Kristina Lerman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors here show that readiness to cooperate between individuals from different groups corresponds to the degree of cultural similarity between those groups. This is consistent with the theory of Cultural Group Selection as an explanation for the rise of human large-scale cooperation.

    • Carla Handley
    •  & Sarah Mathew

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Relative economic benefits of achieving temperature targets have not properly accounted for damages at higher temperatures. Here the authors integrate dynamic cost-benefit analysis with a damage-cost curve and show that the Paris Climate Agreement constitutes the economically optimal policy pathway for the future.

    • Nicole Glanemann
    • , Sven N. Willner
    •  & Anders Levermann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is important to gain a better understanding on the contributing factors fostering climate action in developing countries. Here, the authors investigate the attention levels paid to this issue in the planning and implementation stages of climate policies in Mexico during 1994-2018, and find that international negotiations and executive governmental plans are strong drivers of the climate policy discourse in Mexico and likely to be so for developing countries more generally.

    • Arturo Balderas Torres
    • , Priscila Lazaro Vargas
    •  & Jouni Paavola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Beliefs that justify the economic system buffer against the aversive emotional impact of inequality. Here the authors show that system-justifying economic ideology predicts dampened negativity, measured using self-reported and physiological responses, to manifestations of poverty and wealth.

    • Shahrzad Goudarzi
    • , Ruthie Pliskin
    •  & Eric D. Knowles

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There has been much concern about the “replication crisis” in psychology and other disciplines. Here the authors show that an efficient solution to the crisis would not insist on replication before publication, and would instead encourage publication before replication, with the findings marked as preliminary.

    • Stephan Lewandowsky
    •  & Klaus Oberauer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Birch pitch is thought to have been used in prehistoric times as hafting material or antiseptic and tooth imprints suggest that it was chewed. Here, the authors report a 5,700 year-old piece of chewed birch pitch from Denmark from which they successfully recovered a complete ancient human genome and oral microbiome DNA.

    • Theis Z. T. Jensen
    • , Jonas Niemann
    •  & Hannes Schroeder

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