Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Schurer et al. investigate the impact of Melbourne’s 111-day hard lockdown on different domains of adult human life. Results show that there were some significant but small impacts on human life, with greater adverse effects for parents.
Meta-analyses of 22 traits and analyses of 133 traits from UK Biobank find widespread evidence of mate similarity, particularly for social attitudes, education and substance use traits.
The authors use a series of self-finding games—wherein players must identify themselves when there are multiple potential candidates—to show that humans are near optimal at self-orienting, whereas popular reinforcement learning algorithms are not.
Heat is associated with higher household food insecurity within days of exposure across 150 countries as households. This is mediated by income. Regions with lower incomes and more agricultural or precarious employment are most affected.
Despite widespread concern that social media exacerbates incivility and partisan polarization, few solutions have been identified. In contrast to the popular wisdom, Combs et al. find that anonymous online conversations can reduce polarization.
Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others’ successes. Hawkins et al. use a large-scale collective sensing paradigm to test how individual social inference abilities shape the emergent behaviour of human groups.
Giron et al. provide empirical evidence that human development has much in common with the algorithm of ‘stochastic optimization’ widely used in machine learning, resolving ambiguities around commonly used analogies in developmental psychology.
This meta-analysis of the relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behaviour finds that the relationship varies from being negative to positive, but, on average, higher economic inequality is associated with lower prosocial behaviour.
Christia et al. evaluate the delivery of content to empower women exposed to violence amid COVID-19. The recipients exhibited no credible evidence of a shift in attitudes but increased their knowledge and hypothetical and reported use of resources.
Webb et al. show that new artificial intelligence language models, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, are able to solve analogical reasoning problems at a human-like level of performance.
Studying human mobility during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the authors observe asynchronous temporal dynamics of people’s movements and compare this with spatial mobility changes.
Applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning in intergroup conflict, the authors provide evidence that leaders and followers show behavioural synchronization, as well as neural synchronization in the prefrontal cortex.
A systematic review examines the happiness-promoting strategies most commonly recommended in the media. This review suggests that the scientific evidence underlying some of these strategies, such as physical exercise, is weak.
Using modelling and experimental data, the authors provide evidence that risk aversion may arise from relative underestimation of larger monetary payoffs, a perceptual bias rooted in the noisy logarithmic coding of numerical magnitudes.
Angelo Fasce et al. conducted a systematic literature review and applied natural language processing methods to develop a taxonomy that relates anti-vaccination arguments to their psychological roots.
Can human-aware artificial intelligence help accelerate science? In this article, the authors incorporate the distribution of human expertise by training unsupervised models on simulated inferences cognitively accessible to experts and show that this substantially improves the models’ predictions of future discoveries, but also enables AI to generate high-value alternatives that complement human discoveries.
In 451,233 Chinese adults, Sun et al. find that five aspects of a healthy lifestyle are together associated with longer total life expectancy and a larger proportion of remaining years lived without major non-communicable diseases.