Research articles

Wood and Papachristos show that a gun violence field intervention reduced the two-year incidence of gunshot victimization among participants and their network peers.

Does anatomy affect cross-linguistic differences? Using computer models of the vocal tract, Dediu et al modelled how vowels are learned and transmitted across generations. Simulations show how variations in the hard palate contribute to phonetic diversity.

Cross-culturally, humans have extensive childcare systems that help parents raise their children. Page et al. examine 1,701 alloparent–child dyads in Agta people, finding that both kin selection and reciprocity are important predictors of alloparenting.

Lee et al. show people's biases in social perception can be explained merely by the structure of their social networks, without assuming biased cognition. Social perception biases can be explained by homophily of personal networks and minority-group size.

Wahl et al. present palaeoenvironmental, epigraphic and archaeological evidence that suggests that the Maya engaged in tactics akin to total warfare earlier and more frequently than previously thought.

Would you rather lose your job to a robot or a human? Granulo et al. show that people’s preference for humans to take on the jobs of humans reverses when they consider their own jobs: when it comes to themselves, humans prefer being replaced by robots.

Chenoweth and Belgioioso describe the momentum of protest movements as the product of the number of participants (mass) and concentration of events in time (velocity). Higher momentum is associated with a higher probability of irregular leader exit.

Comparing white matter disconnectivity across 12 psychiatric and neurological disorders, this study finds that the connections most important for global communication and network integration are particularly vulnerable to alterations across multiple brain disorders.

Why are people so often overconfident? Schwardmann and van der Weele show that people self-deceive into higher confidence if they have the opportunity to persuade others for profit and that higher confidence aides persuasion.

A study of genetic associations identifies 46 new loci associated with alcohol consumption. By assessing their function and potential pleiotropy, the authors suggest genetic mechanisms that are shared with neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.

Do people think that behaviour is due to genetics, regardless of whether it’s good or bad? Here Lebowitz et al. find that people think prosocial behaviour is more influenced by genetics than antisocial behaviour; this asymmetry seems to be motivated by people’s desire to blame wrongdoers.

Using data from a cross-cultural study of 11 populations, Scelza et al. demonstrate the facultative nature of jealous response, driven in part by the extent of paternal investment in a particular population.

Young children switched to a preference for an aversive conditioned stimulus if acquisition occurred in the presence of their parent. Results suggest that early learning systems are constructed to permit modification by parental presence.

Whether testosterone changes responses in moral dilemmas is a long-standing question. In a Registered Report, Brannon and colleagues show that unexpectedly, exogenous testosterone increased sensitivity to norms in moral dilemmas.

Are people who know their own abilities better psychologically adjusted than people holding inaccurate views? This Registered Report by He and Côté finds no evidence of strong associations, calling this longstanding proposal into question.

Strimling et al. propose a model that explains the connection between ideology and moral opinions, and validate it with 44 years of polling data, confirming that positions connected to harm and fairness are more popular in liberals and become more popular over time.

Neural processing of speech adapts to goal-oriented behaviour. Here, Rutten et al. show that this process already takes place in primary auditory cortex, where task-relevant acoustic information in speech sounds is selectively enhanced.

Jin et al. find that early growth patterns in substitutive systems follow power laws rather than exponentials. Big data analyses reveal key mechanisms governing substitutions, helping to explain the observed power-law early growth.

Does holding a rose in mind make you see the world through rose-tinted glasses? Combining working memory and perceptual decision-making tasks in three studies, Teng and Kravitz show that internal representations can affect perception of the environment.

Why are people more likely to report seeing what they want to see? Leong et al. take a neurocomputational approach to demonstrate that motivational effects on perceptual judgements reflect a bias in both response and perception.