A Nature Portfolio journal bringing you research and commentary on all aspects of human behaviour. RTs not endorsements. Tweeting with the help of LLMs.
The August issue is out! Featuring a collaborative piece celebrating the 100 years anniversary of the first human EEG recording. Check the entire table of contents here
COVID-19 has not affected all scientists equally. A survey of PI's finds that female scientists, those in the ‘bench sciences’ and especially scientists with young children experienced a substantial decline in time devoted to research
Does oxytocin increase trust?
A registered replication of an influential 2005
@Nature
study by some of the original authors found no evidence of oxytocin on trust in the same conditions
Although people tend to stick to their beliefs (rather than following the evidence), Melnikoff (
@DEMelnikoff
) and Strohminger show that this irrational tendency may still result from fully rational Bayesian calculations.
This new Review from Drew Bailey et al. looks at key challenges for causal inference in studies of human behaviour and offers an overview of methodological solutions for these challenges.
How can the social & behavioural sciences support the COVID-19 pandemic response? 43 experts share insights and highlight research gaps in this Perspective published today:
Much of our charitable giving is ineffective. Why are we motivated to give, but not to give effectively?
The findings of 5 experiments by Burum et al suggest we are more sensitive to effectiveness of our donations when helping ourselves or our families.
Games can help us to understand the human mind, because they are intuitive and fun. In this Perspective, Allen et al. discuss the pros and cons of games over standard lab experiments.
How do markets relate to morality?
@BenjaminEnke
analyses historical folklore to find that a society's degree of market interactions is associated with the cultural salience of prosocial behaviour, interpersonal trust, and universalist moral values.
Leveraging literary history, Baumard et al. find that higher levels of economic development are associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction.
How universal are moral judgments? Including participants from 45 countries,
@BenceBago
et al. find that the situational factors that affect moral reasoning are shared across countries – with little observed cultural variation.
@IASToulouse
@PsySciAcc
Perspective: quasi-experimental methods from economics could be adapted to establish causality in neuroscience and behavioural research, when more costly designs are not an option
@mioana
@KordingLab
This new study by
@kairuggeri
et al reports the results of a multi-national replication study of Kahneman & Tversky’s 1979 “Prospect Theory: An analysis of decision under risk.” Results suggest the original findings do replicate in contemporary settings.
npj Complexity, a new home for research on complex systems at the interface of multiple fields (including behavioural models, social networks, game theory), is now open for submissions! Led by
@LHDnets
.
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. Here,
@hawkrobe
et al. use sensing experiments to test how individual social inference abilities shape the emergent behaviour of human groups.
Lackner et al. show that individuals with an intermediate level of science knowledge tend to have overconfidence in their own knowledge, and negative attitudes to science.
Semantic projection of concrete and/or imageable nouns onto feature subspaces can approximate human ratings, showing an order of these objects in mental space.
@gabe_grand
@IbanDlank
@ev_fedorenko
@fpereira
🎉🎉🎉Nature Human Behaviour turns five!🎉🎉🎉
Read our Editorial here: . We also invited 22 leading experts in some of the key disciplines we cover to share their visions for the future of their disciplines, read the feature here:
Data from more than 4,500 9- to 10-year-olds show no evidence that bilingual children have an advantage in executive functions, the cognitive abilities that are central to the voluntary control of thoughts and behaviours.
#nullresults
Analysing over 48K government interventions in 200+ countries in Mar-Apr 2020, Haug et al. find that combinations of softer measures, e.g. risk communication or increasing healthcare capacity, can be almost as effective against COVID-19 as lockdowns.
.
@sarah_wandelt
et al. introduce a brain-machine interface that can translate intracortical neural activity during inner speech (no movement, no sound) into text in real time.
A meta analysis of 205 effect sizes shows that corrections of science-relevant misinformation were, on average, not successful. But they work better for issues that are not politically polarizing:
Retraction Note for "Machine learning of neural representations of suicide and emotion concepts identifies suicidal youth". The method used overestimated classification accuracy because the features of the classifier were tuned to that particular dataset.
Across ten experiments,
@DEMelnikoff
&
@NinaStrohminger
show that the biasing effect of advocacy is automatic: incentivizing people (including professional lawyers) to advocate altered a range of beliefs about character, guilt and punishment.
"Fresh" scientific teams - teams with members who have never collaborated before - produce papers with greater originality and greater multidisciplinary impact New paper from An Zeng, Ying Fan, Zengru Di, Yougui Wang & Shlomo Havlin
In this Article,
@nhagura
et al. show that the brain learns and remembers actions differently based on the level of uncertainty associated with their context.
@cinet_info
Attention and working memory both fluctuate over time. deBettencourt et al. demonstrate that fluctuations in attention and memory in distinct tasks are synchronous, providing additional evidence for the tight integration of these cognitive processes.
Intracranial brain stimulation in humans elicits a large variety of perceptual, motor, and cognitive effects. Fox et al. show strong links between the distribution and content of these responses and the brain’s intrinsic network architecture.
Social media data are incredibly useful for research on human behaviour. But researchers must use platform-owned APIs to access them, which are not compatible with Open Science principles, explain
@BritDavidson
& al.
Governments should measure pain as a key aspect of societal well-being, alongside metrics like happiness. A comment by Lucía Macchia highlights the importance of measuring pain as a crucial component of national well-being programs.
Chimpanzees and six-year-old children will pay a cost to see the punishment of an antisocial agent when it is deserved, suggesting that both are motivated to see just punishment enacted. A new article in Nature Human Behaviour
Most adolescents exhibit late chronotypes but attend school early in the morning. Goldin et al. show that academic performance improves when school time is aligned with students' biological rhythms.
This new paper by
@rolandimhoff
and colleagues looks at data from 26 countries and finds that
#conspiracy
mentality is more common at both ends of the political spectrum than in the center, and is particularly associated with right-wing beliefs.
Can strategic social distancing lower the risk of COVID-19 transmission?
@block_per
et al show that network-based strategies (bubbles, similarity of contacts & strengthening triadic communities) can keep the curve flat without complete social isolation
Supernatural explanations are more common for natural phenomena (like storms) than social phenomena (like warfare), according to analyses of data from 114 societies, by
@josh_c_jackson
et al.
Lockdowns, although effective against COVID-19, have a huge cost for individuals & societies. We urgently need to develop interventions that promote personal protective behaviours to help curb transmission, argue West,
@SusanMichie
, Rubin &
@DrRichardAmlot
The Earth’s climate is in crisis, and we must act now. During
#COP27
, world leaders are discussing how to address the challenges posed by
#climatechange
. A new Focus issue by
@NatureHumBehav
and
@NatureClimate
highlights the role of human behaviour in adaptation & mitigation. 🧵
Systematically testing language models on a broad battery of Theory of Mind tasks with comparison to human data, a study by
@jamesstrachan
et al. demonstrates human-like performance by AI chatbots such as GPT-4.
@ASTOUND_project
How do people decide whether to seek information? Sharot and Sunstein propose a framework of information seeking that relies on estimates of the potential impact of information on action, affect, and cognition.
Risk aversion may be caused by the way we perceive larger monetary rewards, rather than just economic theories of value. Those with more precise mental representations of magnitude show less risk-averse behavior.
An analysis of more than 30,000 national polls from 351 general elections in 45 countries over the period between 1942 and 2017 shows that, contrary to popular belief, election polling misses have not become more prevalent.
@drjennings
Christopher Wlezien
How do we perceive glossiness?
@katestorrs
& colleagues present computational work that shows that unsupervised generative neural networks trained on renderings of glossy surfaces reproduce human gloss judgments.
This new paper from
@profcikara
et al. finds that violence and negative attitudes toward minoritized groups, become more prevalent as the minoritized group increases in rank in terms of their size.
During the last Ice Age, Neanderthals collected the crania of large herbivores in a small cave in central Spain. This appears to have been a symbolic behaviour, reports Enrique Baquedano et al. from
@UCLPALS
Our January issue is now live! Take a look at our editorial announcing our partnership with
@I4Replication
to reproduce/replicate at scale research published in the journal
This systematic review finds beneficial relationships mostly in authoritarian contexts but detrimental associations in established democracies for different political variables across methods.
@lorenz_spreen
@LisaFOswaldo
@STWorg
@arc_mpib
How does my group think that your group thinks about my group?
We overestimate negative perceptions of ourselves by outgroups, & this can exacerbate intergroup conflict, says a study by
@leesplez
&
@profcikara
out this week
NEW RESEARCH: People typically revisit a set of 25 familiar locations day-to-day, but this set evolves over time and is proportional to the size of their social sphere
@suneman
@a_baronca
@lau_retti
Are meta analyses really a gold standard?
Johannesson et al compare meta analyses & multiple lab replication studies in psychology, & find effect sizes differ significantly & systematically: those reported in meta analyses are generally greater.
Using a computational model to quantify difficulty in reconstructing images from compressed codes,
@qi_lin7
et al. show that reconstruction errors explain aspects of perception and memory performance.
@YalePsychology
@WuTsaiYale
Should PhD students be judged on publication record? In our Focus Issue, authors across career stages discuss how ‘publish or perish’ culture for PhD students affects science & scientists, accompanied by a collection of blog posts
Why do groups of individuals sometimes exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ and other times maladaptive ‘herding’? A new NHB study shows that apparent conflict is regulated by the social learning strategies deployed
High replicability is possible with best practices.
@jprotzko
et al discovered and replicated 16 novel findings with practices like
#preregistration
, large sample sizes, and replication fidelity.
PhD students and early career researchers in Japan are severely underfunded, explains
@momentumyy
. Paired with biased selection criteria, this not only harms Japan’s young scientists, but presents a threat to academia itself.
#phdchat
#AcademicChatter
Can individuals be motivated to identify misinformation? Across 4 experiments,
@steverathje2
,
@jayvanbavel
,
@roozenbot
&
@Sander_vdLinden
find that financial incentives improve accuracy and reduce partisan bias in judgements of political news headlines.
Why do people engage in collective decisions? A new perspective argues that—through sharing responsibility—joint decisions protect individuals from possible negative consequences of difficult decisions by reducing regret & stress & helping avoid punishment
There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk New paper based on a dataset of 33,750 recipes from 70 cuisines! From Lindell Bromham et al.
How do people know when others are part of a group? A social interaction field model can quantify principles governing human perceptions of others’ interactions and accurately predict human judgements of social grouping in static and dynamic social scenes
A meta-analysis of 419 randomized controlled trials finds evidence that various psychological interventions improve mental wellbeing, with small to moderate effect sizes From
@JoepVA
@Mattiasiello
@MikeKyrios
Field experiments by
@KathelijneKoops
et al. find that nut cracking is not readily adopted by wild chimpanzees, suggesting that this cultural behaviour may be socially learned.
Do patterns of temporal discounting generalize around the world?
@kairuggeri
@amma_panin
@edu_gargar
et al use data from 61 countries to look at temporal discounting and inequality around the world.
📃:
Research Briefing:
This new study from Madeline Pelz et al. finds that both children and adults possess the intuitive statistical reasoning and metacognitive strategies that serve as a foundation for “intuitive power analyses”
This meta-analysis by Cox et al. examines different features of infant-directed speech (IDS) across languages and infant ages. Results suggest cross-linguistic tendencies and that caregivers adjust the properties of IDS to suit infants’ changing needs.
Across a series of experiments and simulations, Ma,
@MartinMWiener
et al. show that time is a feature of visual processing that is intrinsic to perceptual experience and closely linked to the probability of recalling an image (memorability).
Is scientific research an isolated ‘ivory tower’ activity?
@dashunwang
et al. analyze five large datasets and show that science public use in patents, news and policy documents closely matches research funding and impact within science.
@KelloggCSSI
information is so strongly embedded in a social network that, in principle, one can profile an individual from their available social ties even when the individual forgoes the platform completely shows a new study in NHB
Universities’ DEI policies do not always translate to actions, argues
@NeilLewisJr
. Instead, their actions disadvantage the people they allegedly support.
Rafiei,
@Mynameismedha
and
@DobyRahnev
develop a neural network (RTNet) that generates stochastic decisions and human-like RT distributions. RTNet reproduces features of human responses and predicts human behavior on novel images.