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Social and behavioural factors impact the emergence, spread and control of human disease. This paper reviews current disease modelling methodologies and the challenges and opportunities for integration with data from social science research and risk communication and community engagement practice.
Köbis et al. outline how artificial intelligence (AI) agents can negatively influence human ethical behaviour. They discuss how this capacity of AI agents can cause problems in the future and put forward a research agenda to gain behavioural insights for better AI oversight.
Genome-wide association studies of behavioural traits can generate predictive polygenic signals. Abdellaoui and Verweij review key developments in this field and explain how advances in methods and data can further our understanding of the relationship between genetic effects and human behaviour.
Cognitive epidemiology studies prospective associations between cognitive abilities and health outcomes. Deary et al. review research in this field over the past decade, synthesizing evidence and outlining open questions.
Winterton et al. review the status and challenges of intranasal oxytocin research and argue that only a combination of theory, methodology and replicability will achieve a successful reorganisation of intranasal oxytocin research.
Harden and Koellinger discuss the goals, methods and challenges of social science genetics, which aims to unravel the genetic underpinnings of individual differences in social, behavioural and health outcomes.
Natural field experiments combine randomized control with an absence of observer effects. However, they have only been used to investigate key labour market phenomena such as unemployment since the early 2000s. This paper reviews the literature and summarizes the insights natural field experiments contribute to the field of unemployment.
Paranoia is not only a symptom of mental disorder, but may also function as part of normal human psychology. Raihani and Bell review the evidence for an evolutionary account of paranoia in which between-group competition favours the development of psychological mechanisms to avoid social threat.
Mental effort is traditionally a subject of psychological research. Kool and Botvinick discuss how recent attempts to study mental effort using concepts from behavioural economics have allowed researchers to better understand how costs and benefits drive when people invest mental effort.
Cullati and colleagues propose a framework to understand vulnerability in later life as a product of biological, psychological, cognitive, emotional, economical and relational ‘reserves’ built up over a lifetime, which can be called on to buffer against or recover from adversity.
Fehr and Schurtenberger show that the prevailing evidence supports the view that social norms are causal drivers of human cooperation and explain major cooperation-related regularities. Norms also guide peer punishment and people have strong preferences for institutions that support norm formation.
Hilbe et al. synthesize recent theoretical work on zero-determinant and ‘rival’ versus ‘partner’ strategies in social dilemmas. They describe the environments under which these contrasting selfish or cooperative strategies emerge in evolution.
Male antisocial behaviour peaks in adolescence and declines later in life. Moffitt reviews recent evidence in support of the hypothesis that the age–crime curve conceals two groups of individuals with different causes.
Diener et al. synthesize findings from psychology and economics on subjective well-being across cultures and identify outstanding questions, priorities for future research and pathways to policy implementation.
Sagiv et al. review two decades of research into personal values. Although subjective in nature, self-reported values predict a large array of attitudes and preferences. As such, they provide invaluable insight into human behaviour.
McAuliffe et al. synthesize recent behavioural and neuroscientific evidence on the development of fairness behaviours in children, which shows that the signatures of human fairness can be traced in childhood.
