Social sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    National parochialism is the tendency to cooperate more with people of the same nation. In a 42-nations study, the authors show that national parochialism is a pervasive phenomenon, present to a similar degree across all the studied nations, and occurs both when decisions are private or public.

    • Angelo Romano
    • , Matthias Sutter
    •  & Daniel Balliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding of complex contagions is crucial for explaining diffusion processes in networks. Guilbeault and Centola introduce topological mechanisms and measures to elucidate spreading dynamics and identify the most influential nodes in social, epidemic and economic networks.

    • Douglas Guilbeault
    •  & Damon Centola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    India’s national school feeding program is the largest of its kind in the world, but the long-term program benefits on nutrition are unknown. Here, the authors show intergenerational program benefits, in that women who received free meals in primary school have children with improved linear growth.

    • Suman Chakrabarti
    • , Samuel P. Scott
    •  & Daniel O. Gilligan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been suggested that younger people care more about climate change than older people. Here, the authors present ten year panel data from New Zealand and show that despite a generation gap in starting levels, climate change beliefs have increased at similar rates across ages over the 2009-2018 period.

    • Taciano L. Milfont
    • , Elena Zubielevitch
    •  & Chris G. Sibley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates can be used to estimate past demography, but methods to test for associations with environmental change are lacking. Here, DiNapoli et al. propose an approach using Approximate Bayesian Computation and illustrate it in a case study of Rapa Nui.

    • Robert J. DiNapoli
    • , Enrico R. Crema
    •  & Terry L. Hunt

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Whether or not a city achieves absolute sustainability is difficult to assess with existing frameworks. Here the authors, in a review, show that a further integration of consumption-based accounting and benchmarking is necessary to aid the monitoring and assessment of Sustainable Development Goals in cities.

    • Thomas Wiedmann
    •  & Cameron Allen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors examine how altruism can emerge as people come to trust a public institution of moral assessment, which broadcasts whether individuals have good or bad reputations for reciprocity.

    • Arunas L. Radzvilavicius
    • , Taylor A. Kessinger
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors show that an integrative thinking process linked philosophically to wisdom may reduce group polarization. Specifically, wise reasoning improves intergroup attitudes and behavior even at time of heightened societal conflicts.

    • Justin P. Brienza
    • , Franki Y. H. Kung
    •  & Melody M. Chao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ride-sharing, combining similar concurrent trips into one, may support sustainable urban mobility yet lacks broad adoption. Storch et al. reveal how collective interactions in shared rides explain essential characteristics of ride-sharing adoption patterns e.g. observed in New York City and Chicago.

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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change is likely to damage economies worldwide. Here the authors show that this strongly reduces incentives to invest causing additional losses, whereas if investors include climate-change mitigation in their action portfolio they can avoid damages for themselves and the global economy.

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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    China has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality in 2060. Here the authors find a promising option to abate 1.0 Gt CO2-eq yr−1 of carbon emissions at a marginal cost of $69 (t CO2-eq)−1 by retrofitting 222 GW of coal power plants to co-fire with biomass and upgrading to CCS operation across 2836 counties in China.

    • Xiaofan Xing
    • , Rong Wang
    •  & Siqing Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Individual exposure to heat is associated with adverse health and economic outcomes. Here, the authors show that people of color and people living in poverty bear a disproportionate burden of urban heat exposure in almost all major cities in the continental United States.

    • Angel Hsu
    • , Glenn Sheriff
    •  & Diego Manya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Do we mitigate climate change in a Kyoto style global agreement or via multiple agreements among smaller groups of states? Here the authors show that the best strategy may begin with regional legally binding, aggressive agreements and, as these become common, renew pursuit of a global legally-binding treaty.

    • Vadim A. Karatayev
    • , Vítor V. Vasconcelos
    •  & Madhur Anand

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Singleton and colleagues publish in Nature Communications an intervention study to reduce antimicrobial usage in companion animal practice. They identify significant reductions in antimicrobial usage with their more active intervention group over approximately a 6-month period. The study offers an exciting way forward to explore further the trial interventions and assess alternative methods to improve antimicrobial stewardship in veterinary practice.

    • David Brodbelt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Adverse climatic conditions are commonly reported to shape asylum migration, but their effect relative to other drivers is unknown. Here the authors compare climatic, economic, and political factors as predictors of future asylum flows to the EU and find that war and repression are the most important factors.

    • Sebastian Schutte
    • , Jonas Vestby
    •  & Halvard Buhaug

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recent technological, social, and educational changes are profoundly impacting our work, but what makes labour markets resilient to those labour shocks? Here, the authors show that labour markets resemble ecological systems whose resilience depends critically on the network of skill similarities between different jobs.

    • Esteban Moro
    • , Morgan R. Frank
    •  & Iyad Rahwan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human perceptual and cognitive abilities are limited resources and consequently cheaply available information translates into hypercompetition for rewarding outcomes. Here the authors show, with empirical analysis and an ecological model, that actors-memes ecosystems evolve towards a narrow set of emergent, natural network patterns.

    • María J. Palazzi
    • , Albert Solé-Ribalta
    •  & Javier Borge-Holthoefer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding how cities respond to extreme weather is critical; as such events are becoming more frequent. Using anonymized mobile phone data for Houston, Texas during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the authors find that mobility behavior exposes neighborhood disparities in resilience capacity and recovery.

    • Boyeong Hong
    • , Bartosz J. Bonczak
    •  & Constantine E. Kontokosta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Effective use of antimicrobials in both humans and animals is essential to help slow the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. Here, Singleton et al. present a randomised controlled trial demonstrating the efficacy of social norm messaging to reduce antibiotic prescription frequency in veterinary surgeries.

    • David A. Singleton
    • , Angela Rayner
    •  & Gina L. Pinchbeck

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tropical cyclones can cause severe damage and can thus have devastating impacts on societies. Here, the authors use Medicare data to show that tropical cyclone exposure in the United States is associated with increased hospitalization rates for older adults from many different acute causes.

    • Robbie M. Parks
    • , G. Brooke Anderson
    •  & Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    As countries experience economic growth, diversification of economic activities may occur. Here, the authors develop a probabilistic model to examine the diversification of economic activities and how countries may move from small ecosystem products to advanced product clusters over time.

    • Neave O’Clery
    • , Muhammed Ali Yıldırım
    •  & Ricardo Hausmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite the popularity of social media, the psychological processes that drive people to engage in it remain poorly understood. The authors applied a computational modeling approach to data from multiple social media platforms to show that engagement can be explained by mechanisms of reward learning.

    • Björn Lindström
    • , Martin Bellander
    •  & David M. Amodio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Not much is known about the joint relationships between social network structure, urban geography, and inequality. Here, the authors analyze an online social network and find that the fragmentation of social networks is significantly higher in towns in which residential neighborhoods are divided by physical barriers such as rivers and railroads.

    • Gergő Tóth
    • , Johannes Wachs
    •  & Balázs Lengyel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Performance on a cognitive reflection test correlates with a wide range of behaviours in survey studies. Here the authors investigate the relationship between cognitive reflection and some aspects of actual behaviour on social media.

    • Mohsen Mosleh
    • , Gordon Pennycook
    •  & David G. Rand

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Synthetic biology engineering principles enable two-way communication between living and inanimate substrates. Here the authors consider the development of this bio-informational exchange and propose cyber-physical architectures and applications.

    • Thomas A. Dixon
    • , Thomas C. Williams
    •  & Isak S. Pretorius

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Governments may struggle to impose costly polices on vital industries, resulting in a greater need for negative emissions. Here, the authors model a direct air capture crash deployment program, finding it can remove 2.3 GtCO2 yr–1 in 2050, 13–20 GtCO2 yr–1 in 2075, and 570–840 GtCO2 cumulative over 2025–2100.

    • Ryan Hanna
    • , Ahmed Abdulla
    •  & David G. Victor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Category systems exhibit striking agreement across many cultures, yet paradoxically individuals exhibit large variation in the categorization of novel stimuli. Here the authors show that critical mass dynamics explain the convergence of independent populations on shared category systems.

    • Douglas Guilbeault
    • , Andrea Baronchelli
    •  & Damon Centola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Digital trace data from search engines lacks information about the experiences of the individuals generating the data. Here the authors link search data and human computation to build a tracking model of influenza-like illness.

    • Stefan Wojcik
    • , Avleen S. Bijral
    •  & David Lazer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether disasters spur policy change remains contested. Here, the authors utilize a dataset of 10,976 natural hazard events and multiple disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy indicators across 85 countries over eight years to show that frequency and severity factors are unassociated with improved DRR policy.

    • Daniel Nohrstedt
    • , Maurizio Mazzoleni
    •  & Giuliano Di Baldassarre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions not only amplify the global climate crisis, but cause damage currently unaccounted for by food prices. Here the authors show the calculation of prices with internalized climate costs for food categories and production systems, revealing strong market distortions.

    • Maximilian Pieper
    • , Amelie Michalke
    •  & Tobias Gaugler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Randomised controlled experiments are the gold standard for scientific inference, but environmental and social scientists often rely on different study designs. Here the authors analyse the use of six common study designs in the fields of biodiversity conservation and social intervention, and quantify the biases in their estimates.

    • Alec P. Christie
    • , David Abecasis
    •  & William J. Sutherland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current inequality and market consumption modelling appears to be subjective. Here the authors combined all three axes of poverty modelling - Engel-Krishnakumar’s microeconomics, Aoki-Chattopadhyay’s mathematical precept and found that multivariate construction is a key component of economic data analysis, implying all modes of income and expenditure need to be considered to arrive at a proper weighted prediction of poverty.

    • Amit K. Chattopadhyay
    • , T. Krishna Kumar
    •  & Iain Rice

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Terms such as ‘climate change’ and ‘climate crisis’ need to be evaluated for their effectiveness for public perception. In this study of a sample of the Taiwanese public reactions to the terms were largely the same, however, in specific subgroups the term ‘climate crisis’ faced some backlash.

    • Li-San Hung
    •  & Mucahid Mustafa Bayrak

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Marine aquaculture is widely proposed as compatible with ocean sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and human nutrition goals. In this Perspective, Belton and colleagues dispute the empirical validity of such claims and contend that the potential of marine aquaculture has been much exaggerated.

    • Ben Belton
    • , David C. Little
    •  & Shakuntala H. Thilsted

  • Article
    | Open Access

    By analyzing President Trump’s tweets and data from two media sources, the authors provide evidence suggesting that when the media reports on a topic potentially harmful to the president, he tweets about unrelated issues. Further evidence from this case study suggests that these diversionary tweets may also successfully reduce subsequent media coverage of the harmful topic.

    • Stephan Lewandowsky
    • , Michael Jetter
    •  & Ullrich K. H. Ecker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous research on the importance of prosociality is based on observations from WEIRD societies, questioning the generalizability of these findings. Here the authors present a global investigation of the relation between prosociality and labor market success and generalize the positive relation to a wide geographical context.

    • Fabian Kosse
    •  & Michela M. Tincani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate action from local actors is vital in achieving nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Here the authors show that existing commitments from U.S. states, cities and business could reduce emissions 25% below 2005 levels by 2030, with expanded subnational action reducing emissions by 37% and federal action by up to 49%.

    • Nathan E. Hultman
    • , Leon Clarke
    •  & John O’Neill

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