Research articles

Brauer et al. show that communication about peers’ pro-diversity attitudes and inclusive behaviours increases positive attitudes toward outgroups among university students and improves sense of belonging and better grades among marginalized students.

Xie et al. combine evidence from behavioural data, computational modelling and intracranial electroencephalogram methods to show that the human brain prioritizes certain information to facilitate associative memory retrieval.

The COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet v.1.0) compiles real time, publicly available (https://coronanet-project.org) data on policy announcements made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic across the world.

Lopez and Rodo explore post-lockdown scenarios by using a stochastic modified SEIR model, showing that lockdowns should last at least 60 days to avoid a second wave of infection. Social distancing, increasing awareness and personal protective behaviours could replace lockdowns.

In this Registered Report, Berens et al. demonstrate that forgetting predominantly involves losses in memory accessibility with little or no change in memory precision.

An influential 2005 study by Kosfeld et al. suggested that oxytocin increases trust in strangers. This registered replication study by some of the original authors found no effect of oxytocin on trusting behaviour under the same conditions.

Fusing models from epidemiology and network science, Block et al. show how to ease lockdown and slow infection spread by strategic modification of contact through seeking similarity, strengthening communities and repeating interaction in bubbles.

Guan et al. analyse the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions on global supply chains. Earlier, stricter and shorter lockdowns can minimize overall losses. A ‘go-slow’ approach to lifting restrictions may reduce overall damages if it avoids the need for further lockdowns.

Maier, Raja Beharelle et al. provide a computational model of the decision process that quantifies the temporal dynamics of weighing different attributes. Their time-varying drift diffusion model reveals latent individual differences in decision-making.

What role do interest groups play in environmental policy? Orach et al. find that coalition-building among interest groups in response to a perceived crisis can delay or prevent resource collapses, even when competing interest coalitions have unequal resources.

A new study shows that chimpanzees possess a highly diverse culture of termite fishing that differs strongly among groups. Individuals copy group-specific techniques, and their combinations, with high conformity to maintain a unique group culture.

Prosocial behaviours are ubiquitous in nature. These building blocks of cooperative societies can come in many forms, depending on how the underlying social good is produced and distributed. In this study, the authors show that heterogeneous populations can strongly promote the evolution of prosocial behaviours. However, this efficient evolution reveals a thorny side of prosocial behaviours: they generate the possibility of widespread wealth inequality, even to the point of being a detriment to the poorest in the population. The authors provide a general framework that can be used to understand when this harmful prosociality will emerge in a population. These findings suggest that institutional interventions are often essential for maintaining equitable outcomes in heterogeneous societies.

Using large-scale data, Kraemer et al. find that human mobility patterns vary across the globe and in scale by environmental and sociodemographic contexts. There are tenfold differences in mobility patterns depending on the countries’ economic development.

In a cohort of 1,196 children followed to age 29 years, the authors found that risk of psychopathology was more strongly associated with subjective recall of childhood maltreatment histories than with objective, court-documented evidence of maltreatment.

In a sample of over 4,000 participants from 19 countries, the core patterns from a highly influential study on behaviour and decision-making broadly replicate, with only minor exceptions and somewhat smaller effect sizes.

Fewlass et al. recover dairy residues from hunter-gatherer pottery from highland Lesotho dating from mid-to-late first millennium ad, which implies ongoing contact between these groups and coastal agriculturalists not long after they first arrived in southern Africa.

Adolescents are prone to risky decisions. In a two-step approach, splitting a database of adolescents’ responses in a foraging task into discovery and confirmation samples, Bach et al. show that sex is the largest predictor of risky decisions.

Pierson et al. compiled and analysed a dataset detailing nearly 100 million traffic stops conducted across the United States, finding evidence of persistent racial bias against black and Hispanic drivers in police stops and search decisions.