Social sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Online misinformation is a threat to a well-informed electorate and undermines democracy. Here, the authors analyse the spread of articles on Twitter, find that bots play a major role in the spread of low-credibility content and suggest control measures for limiting the spread of misinformation.

    • Chengcheng Shao
    • , Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia
    •  & Filippo Menczer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Paris Agreement includes bottom-up pledges and top-down warming threshold. Under this setting where countries effectively choose their own fairness principle, this article assesses the global warming implied by each Nationally Determined Contribution to inform the future ratcheting-up process.

    • Yann Robiou du Pont
    •  & Malte Meinshausen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The sense of ownership – of which objects belong to us and which to others - is an important part of our lives, but how the brain keeps track of ownership is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that specific brain areas are involved in ownership acquisition for the self, friends, and strangers.

    • Patricia L. Lockwood
    • , Marco K. Wittmann
    •  & Matthew F. S. Rushworth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Complex networks can be a useful tool to investigate problems in social science. Here the authors use game theory to establish a network model and then use a machine learning approach to characterize the role of nodes within a social network.

    • Yuan Yuan
    • , Ahmad Alabdulkareem
    •  & Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans infer the trustworthiness of others based on subtle facial features such as the facial width-to-height ratio, but it is not known whether other primates are sensitive to these cues. Here, the authors show that macaque monkeys prefer to look at human faces which appear trustworthy to humans.

    • Manuela Costa
    • , Alice Gomez
    •  & Angela Sirigu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An individual’s social network—their friends, family, and acquaintances—is important for their health, but existing tools for assessing social networks have limitations. Here, the authors introduce a quantitative social network assessment tool on a secure open-source web platform and show its utility in a nation-wide study.

    • Amar Dhand
    • , Charles C. White
    •  & Philip L. De Jager

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Longobards invaded and conquered much of Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Here, the authors sequence and analyze ancient genomic DNA from 63 samples from two cemeteries associated with the Longobards and identify kinship networks and two distinct genetic and cultural groups in each.

    • Carlos Eduardo G. Amorim
    • , Stefania Vai
    •  & Krishna R. Veeramah

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The presence of opposite horizontal motion in the two eyes is a cue for perceiving motion-in-depth, but also leads to suppressed motion sensitivity. Here, the authors address this paradox and show that spatial and interocular integration mechanisms, distinct from the extraction of motion-in-depth, drive suppression.

    • Peter J. Kohler
    • , Wesley J. Meredith
    •  & Anthony M. Norcia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Digital traces of our lives have the potential to allow insights into collective behaviors. Here, the authors cluster consumers by their credit card purchase sequences and discover five distinct groups, within which individuals also share similar mobility and demographic attributes.

    • Riccardo Di Clemente
    • , Miguel Luengo-Oroz
    •  & Marta C. González

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Synthetic biology often views the organism as a chassis into which a circuit can be inserted. Here the authors explore the idea of the organism as a core aspect of design, aiding researchers in navigating the genetic space opened up by SCRaMbLE.

    • Erika Szymanski
    •  & Jane Calvert

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The decoy effect refers to the fact that the presence of a third option can shift people’s preferences between two other options even though the third option is inferior to both. Here, the authors show how the decoy effect can enhance cooperation in a social dilemma, the repeated prisoner’s dilemma.

    • Zhen Wang
    • , Marko Jusup
    •  & Stefano Boccaletti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Economists have observed that many people seem unwilling to save for the future. Here, the authors show that earning and saving are subject to a basic asymmetry in attentional choice, such that cues that are associated with saving are perceived as occurring later than cues associated with earning.

    • Kesong Hu
    • , Eve De Rosa
    •  & Adam K. Anderson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reducing the adverse effects of climate change triggered by human activity requires cooperation on a global scale. Modelling this challenge as an evolutionary game shows that the emerging contributions of selfish players depend strongly on the risk scenario at stake.

    • Maria Abou Chakra
    • , Silke Bumann
    •  & Arne Traulsen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong positive and strong negative reciprocators reward cooperation and punish defection, respectively, regardless of future benefits. Here, Weber and colleagues demonstrate that dispositions towards strong positive and strong negative reciprocity are not correlated within individuals.

    • Till O. Weber
    • , Ori Weisel
    •  & Simon Gächter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The cumulative development of culture has proven difficult to study in the laboratory. Here, the authors examine entries to a series of large programming contests to show that successful entries are usually ‘tweaks’ of existing solutions, but occasional ‘leaps’ can bring larger benefits.

    • Elena Miu
    • , Ned Gulley
    •  & Luke Rendell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ambiguous uncertainty refers to situations where the likelihood of specific outcomes are not known. Here, the authors show that people tolerant to ambiguous uncertainty are more likely to make costly decisions to cooperate with or trust others.

    • Marc-Lluís Vives
    •  & Oriel FeldmanHall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social learning is a crucial human ability. Here, the authors examined children in 7 cultures and show that children’s reliance on social information and their preference to follow the majority vary across societies. However, the ontogeny of majority preference follows the same, U-shaped pattern across all societies.

    • Edwin J. C. van Leeuwen
    • , Emma Cohen
    •  & Daniel B. M. Haun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous studies of Pre-Columbian earthworks in the Amazon basin have left a gap in the Upper Tapajós Basin (UTB). Here, the authors detect 104 Pre-Columbian earthworks in the UTB, suggesting continuous occupation across southern Amazonia and higher population densities than previously estimated.

    • Jonas Gregorio de Souza
    • , Denise Pahl Schaan
    •  & José Iriarte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cross-cultural interactions can cause cultural change, a process known as acculturation. Here, Erten et al. develop a model of cultural change under immigration, considering individuals’ orientations towards acculturation, and find that willingness to interact cross-culturally and resident cultural conservatism favour cultural coexistence.

    • E. Yagmur Erten
    • , Pieter van den Berg
    •  & Franz J. Weissing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Bronze-age Indus civilisation (4.6–3.9 ka) was thought to have been linked to the development of water resources in the Himalayas. Here, the authors show that along the former course of the Sutlej River the Indus settlements developed along the abandoned river valley rather than an active Himalayan river.

    • Ajit Singh
    • , Kristina J. Thomsen
    •  & Sanjeev Gupta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    China has entered a new normal phase of economic development with a changing role in global trade. Here the authors show that emissions embodied in China’s exports declined from 2007 to 2012, while developing countries become the major destinations of China’s export emissions.

    • Zhifu Mi
    • , Jing Meng
    •  & Klaus Hubacek

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding and accurate prediction of human mobility is of increasing importance, but a universal framework is lacking. Here, the authors develop a unified model that accurately predicts both individual and population mobility and scaling behaviors on diverse spatial scales.

    • Xiao-Yong Yan
    • , Wen-Xu Wang
    •  & Ying-Cheng Lai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The consequences of poverty eradication on limiting warming to 2 °C are not fully clear. Here, Hubacek et al. find that while ending extreme poverty does not jeopardize the climate target, moving everybody to a modest expenditure level increases required mitigation rate by 27%

    • Klaus Hubacek
    • , Giovanni Baiocchi
    •  & Anand Patwardhan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influence of sample composition on human neuroimaging results is unknown. Here, the authors weight a large, community-based sample to better reflect the US population and describe how applying these sample weights changes conclusions about age-related variation in brain structure.

    • Kaja Z. LeWinn
    • , Margaret A. Sheridan
    •  & Katie A. McLaughlin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    International and domestic interprovincial trade of China are entangled, but their health impacts have been treated separately in earlier studies. Here Wang. quantify the complex impacts of trade on public health across China within an integrative framework.

    • Haikun Wang
    • , Yanxu Zhang
    •  & Michael B. McElroy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Knowledge of payoffs has been assumed to be weakly beneficial for the emergence of cooperation between humans. Here the authors provide evidence to the contrary, showing that during interactions in a competitive environment access to information about payoffs leads to less cooperative behaviour.

    • Steffen Huck
    • , Johannes Leutgeb
    •  & Ryan Oprea

  • Editorial
    | Open Access

    As the challenges and environmental consequences of climate change manifest, the need for a society of science-literate citizens is becoming increasingly apparent. Achieving this, however, is no easy task, particularly given the proliferation of fake news and the seeds of confusion it can sow

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some argue that health-related behaviours, such as obesity, are contagious, but empirical evidence of health contagion remains inconclusive. Here, using a large scale quasi-experiment in a global network of runners, Aral and Nicolaides show that this type of contagion exists in fitness behaviours.

    • Sinan Aral
    •  & Christos Nicolaides

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In ancient cultures without a writing system, it is difficult to infer the basis of status and rank. Here the authors analyse ancient DNA from nine presumed elite individuals buried successively over a 300-year period at Chaco Canyon, and show evidence of matrilineal relationships.

    • Douglas J. Kennett
    • , Stephen Plog
    •  & George H. Perry

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The spread of instabilities in financial systems, similarly to ecosystems, is influenced by topological features of the underlying network structures. Here the authors show, independently of specific financial models, that market integration and diversification can drive the system towards instability.

    • Marco Bardoscia
    • , Stefano Battiston
    •  & Guido Caldarelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Network science and game theory have been traditionally combined to analyse interactions between nodes of a network. Here, the authors model competition for importance among networks themselves, and reveal dominance of the underdogs in the fate of networks-of-networks.

    • Jaime Iranzo
    • , Javier M. Buldú
    •  & Jacobo Aguirre

  • Review Article |

    Carbon mitigation is considered an important and viable pathway towards climate stabilization, but competition for land is high. Here, Canadell and Schulze consider the sustainable implementation of a number of land-based biological carbon mitigation activities and assess the carbon savings achievable by 2050.

    • Josep G. Canadell
    •  & E. Detlef Schulze

  • Article |

    Wind power installations have boomed across Europe in recent decades, yet the potentially negative impact of wind farms on climate remains largely untested. Vautard et al. parameterize operational and planned European wind farms in a regional climate model and show limited regional-scale climate impacts.

    • Robert Vautard
    • , Françoise Thais
    •  & Paolo Michele Ruti

  • Article |

    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

  • Article |

    Accurate estimates of tropical forest carbon stocks are needed for policies to reduce emissions from loss of forests. By looking at a central area in the Congo Basin, Kearsleyet al.find that inconsistencies in height–diameter relationships across Central Africa cause overestimations between regions.

    • Elizabeth Kearsley
    • , Thales de Haulleville
    •  & Hans Verbeeck

  • Article |

    An enduring paradox of urban economics is why cities support levels of enterprise, such as patents and inventions, higher than the countryside. Here Pentland et al. suggest that the density of social ties provides a greater flow of ideas, resulting in increased productivity and innovation.

    • Wei Pan
    • , Gourab Ghoshal
    •  & Alex Pentland

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