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.
Scientific research can have a positive impact on society, particularly in a health crisis. But to fully achieve this, scientists must engage with end-users from the very beginning of the research process, writes Lea Pare Toe.
Accounting for the genetic effects of education and socioeconomic status, psychopathology and psychosocial factors revealed trait-specific genetic architecture, associated biological inference and correlative and putatively causal relationships.
Dietze and Craig find that framing economic inequality as group disadvantages (versus advantages) increases Americans’ engagement with the issue and support for mitigating action. This is partly driven by perceptions of disadvantages as more unjust.
Kelly, Corbett and O’Connell use neurally informed modelling to establish that humans account for time constraints and prior probability in their perceptual decisions by adjusting multiple distinct components of a build-to-threshold process.
The authors investigated over 100 human complex traits in 80,889 couples from UK Biobank, finding evidence that the genotype of one person explains trait variation in another person. The genotypes of those around us are an important part of our environment.
Politicians and law enforcement officials have advocated the militarization of local law enforcement on the grounds that it promotes public and officer safety, and some early research seemingly supported those claims. Two new studies reveal limitations in the data used in this prior work. When these issues are addressed, evidence for the benefits of militarization largely vanishes.
Studies of transfers of surplus military equipment to police have argued that they reduce crime. Gunderson et al. reanalysed US federal data and replicated key studies. They find no credible evidence that crime drops when local police get more SME.
Lowande shows that existing estimates of the effect of police militarization in the United States are based on incomplete data. When military surplus was recalled from local police, there were negligible or undetectable impacts on violent crime and officer safety.
The harassment of researchers working in the social sciences—not rarely an organized effort targeting members of marginalized groups—is most alarming. Its implications reach from severe personal consequences to the risk of scientific self-censorship. We invite readers to engage in a much-needed discourse about this worrisome phenomenon.