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Studying production, funding and consumption of science, the authors find a strong alignment between what the public consumes and what is impactful, as well as an alignment between funding and collective public use.
Burke et al. show that smoke exposure is associated with behavioural changes and worsening sentiment, with important differences by income. They document substantial infiltration of smoke into homes, suggesting that current policy reliance on self-protection could be ineffective.
Koster, Balaguer et al. show that an AI mechanism is able to learn to produce a redistribution policy which is preferred to alternatives by humans in an incentivized game.
Rotaru et al. introduce a transparent crime forecasting algorithm that reveals inequities in police enforcement and suggests an enforcement bias in eight US cities.
Goldenberg et al. show that we tend to overestimate the average intensity of a sequence of emotional expressions and that this is caused by increased memory for stronger expressions.
Berger et al. investigate green defaults under varying prices. Using field data from a flight compensation platform, they show that green defaults are effective. Their effectiveness, however, vanishes when costs become too high.
Using a mathematical model of viral spread and Twitter data, Bak-Coleman and coauthors show how a combination of interventions, such as fact-checking, nudging and account suspension, can help combat the spread of misinformation.
Pahor et al. find evidence across three experiments that the extent to which people improve in matrix reasoning as a result of N-back training is associated with their degree of improvement on working memory tasks similar to the training task.
Niarchou et al. identify 69 genomic loci associated with people’s synchronization to a musical beat. The genetic architecture of beat synchronization was enriched for genes involved in early brain development and lifelong brain function.
A randomized trial in Botswana during COVID-19 provides evidence of effective distance education using ‘low-tech’ mobile phone approaches when school is disrupted. Weekly phone tutoring and SMS messages improved learning cost-effectively.
Using a participatory cognitive paradigm based on gaze contingency, Kanakogi et al. show that eight-month-olds increased their selective gaze to antisocial others to punish them, suggesting that preverbal infants engage in third-party punishment.
Research has suggested that attention rhythmically switches between targets at a frequency of 3–8 Hz. Here Brookshire shows that seemingly periodic rhythms of attention may be artefactual.
Using a survey of over 4,000 devout Shia pilgrims across Iran and Iraq, Knox and collaborators evaluate theories about the nature of sectarian animosity and find similarities to ethno-nationalism but not transnational or religious movements.
Proof-of-vaccination mandates for non-essential venues and activities were rapidly followed by >60% increases in weekly first-dose COVID-19 vaccinations in Canada, France, Italy and Germany, leading to cumulative gains in vaccination rates.
Newberry and Plotkin show that the frequency of a cultural trait can influence its tendency to be copied. They develop a method to measure frequency-dependent selection and describe how it relates to the dynamics and diversity of first names and dog breed preferences, in different countries and cultures.
Prat-Carrabin and Woodford show that the bias and variance in participants’ estimates of numbers both depend on the numbers and on the prior, suggesting an optimal use of limited representational capacities through efficient coding and Bayesian decoding.