Society articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using historical data across the U.S., the authors find that population declines are associated with flood exposure. Projecting this relationship to 2053, the authors find that flood risk may result in 7% lower growth than otherwise expected.

    • Evelyn G. Shu
    • , Jeremy R. Porter
    •  & Edward Kearns

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People differ in the extent to which they experience a lack of economic resources compared to others. Here, the authors show that such experiences at the individual level as well as income inequality at the national level are associated with self-reported morality-related outcomes.

    • Christian T. Elbæk
    • , Panagiotis Mitkidis
    •  & Tobias Otterbring

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impacts of COVID-19 have been more severe in certain population groups, including migrants. In this total-population study from Sweden, the authors investigate the association between country of birth and COVID-19 related hospitalisation and death and describe how it changed over the first two years of the pandemic.

    • Mikael Rostila
    • , Agneta Cederström
    •  & Sol P. Juárez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated an important changes in online information access. Here, the authors analyse everyday web search interactions across 25,150 US ZIP codes revealing significant differences in how digital informational resources are mobilized by different communities.

    • Jina Suh
    • , Eric Horvitz
    •  & Tim Althoff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How daylight saving time shift (DST) affects mortality dynamics on a large population scale remains unknown. Here, the authors examine the impact of DST on all-cause mortality in 16 European countries for the period 1998-2012.

    • Laurent Lévy
    • , Jean-Marie Robine
    •  & François R. Herrmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continued monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 at the population level is important for identifying at-risk groups. Here the authors analyse data from a serological surveillance platform in San Francisco and find considerable variation in infection and vaccination history by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

    • Isobel Routledge
    • , Saki Takahashi
    •  & Isabel Rodríguez-Barraquer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large amounts of interaction data are collected by messaging apps, mobile phone carriers, and social media. Creţu et al. propose a behavioral profiling attack model and show that the stability of people’s interaction networks over time can allow individuals to be re-identified in interaction datasets.

    • Ana-Maria Creţu
    • , Federico Monti
    •  & Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social convention change due to diffusion is often described by agent-based models focusing on the role of social coordination. In this work the authors uncover two additional individual-level mechanisms, trend-seeking and inertia, that can critically shape the collective behavior of the population.

    • Mengbin Ye
    • , Lorenzo Zino
    •  & Ming Cao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social media platforms moderating misinformation have been accused of political bias. Here, the authors use neutral social bots to show that, while there is no strong evidence for such a bias, the content to which Twitter users are exposed depends strongly on the political leaning of early Twitter connections.

    • Wen Chen
    • , Diogo Pacheco
    •  & Filippo Menczer

  • 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

  • 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

    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

    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

    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

    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

  • 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 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

    Household income is used as a marker of socioeconomic position, a trait that is associated with better physical and mental health. Here, Hill et al. report a genome-wide association study for household income in the UK and explore its relationship with intelligence in post-GWAS analyses including Mendelian randomization.

    • W. David Hill
    • , Neil M. Davies
    •  & Ian J. Deary

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impacts of technological development on social sphere lack strong empirical foundation. Here the authors presented quantitative analysis of the phenomenon of social acceleration across a range of digital datasets and found that interest appears in bursts that dissipate on decreasing timescales and occur with increasing frequency.

    • Philipp Lorenz-Spreen
    • , Bjarke Mørch Mønsted
    •  & Sune Lehmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social groups form collective memories, but the temporal dynamics of this process are unclear. Here, the authors show that when early conversations involve individuals that bridge across clusters of a social network, the network reaches higher mnemonic convergence compared to when early conversations occur within clusters.

    • Ida Momennejad
    • , Ajua Duker
    •  & Alin Coman

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Sharing activities are under wide debate regarding the environmental impacts. Here the authors reviewed their benefits and problems and suggested that a simultaneous improvement of both ecological and economic efficiency is necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

    • Zhifu Mi
    •  & D’Maris Coffman

  • 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

    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

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