Reviews & Analysis

Are social isolation and loneliness associated with an increased risk of mortality? Wang et al. show that both social isolation and loneliness are associated with an increased risk of all-cause and cancer mortality in the general population by a systematic review and meta-analysis of 90 prospective cohort studies.

The spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain have an essential role in how we perceive, decide and behave. Interacting spiral waves are now seen, from functional magnetic resonance imaging brain recordings, to serve as a mechanism for organizing spatiotemporal activity across the whole cortex. Further, these waves enable flexible reconfiguration of task-driven brain activity.

Park et al. analyse a large global dataset of GBIF-mediated records, and report survey results from active herbaria (plant collections), to examine how the past assembly of herbaria bears the stamp of the colonial enterprise and how this legacy and behaviour is still with us today.

Liu and coauthors review the major data sources, measures and analysis methods in the science of science, discussing how recent developments in these fields can help researchers to better predict science-making outcomes and design better science policies.

The authors summarize the most recent developments in twin studies, recent results from twin studies of new phenotypes and new insights into twinning as a phenotype. They also provide an updated overview of twin concordance and discordance for major diseases and mental disorders.

Many policymakers turn to the military to reduce crime. Yet, evidence describing the effects of military policing is nearly nonexistent. Blair and Weintraub evaluate the effects of military policing on crime and human rights violations in Cali, Colombia. Their results suggest crime incidence and insecurity perceptions did not decrease, which leaves lessons for the design and implementation of security policies.

Why do expressions of emotion seem so heightened on social media? Brady et al. argue that extreme moral outrage on social media is not only driven by the producers and sharers of emotional expressions, but also by systematic biases in the way people that perceive moral outrage on social media.

Refugee adolescents in German schools have fewer friends and are more often rejected than their classmates. However, refugees are less rejected in more diverse classrooms because, first, other ethnic minority peers are more accepting of refugees and, second, majority-group peers build more positive relationships with refugees in more diverse settings.

Supernatural beliefs shape how people understand the world, but there is debate regarding how these beliefs relate to the natural or social world. Jackson and colleagues quantitatively analysed the ethnographic record and found evidence that supernatural explanations are more commonly used for natural than for social phenomena.

Semantic representations enable humans to identify stimuli. We illustrate that the organization of semantic representations is in part shaped by psychological needs: people who are averse to uncertainty have more-differentiated and separable semantic representations than individuals who are tolerant of uncertainty, and this separation predicts improved discrimination but poorer generalization.

A century of experiments on human visual memory have catalogued the many determinants of what people remember about their visual environments. In a massive experimental study of visual memory, Huang leverages mobile gaming to collect a dataset of 35 million behavioural responses that reveals how the mechanisms of visual spatial memory fit together.

One of the reasons that people perform poorly when trying to detect deception is the difficulty of integrating multiple cues into a binary judgement. A simple heuristic of only judging the level of detail in the message consistently allowed people to discriminate lies from truths.

Behavioural science is increasingly used in the public and private sectors, but it has been subject to several criticisms. This Perspective proposes a manifesto for behavioural science, addressing these criticisms and describing a way forward for the field.

Polygenic indices (PGIs) are increasingly advocated as screening tools for personalized medicine and education. We find, however, that rankings of individuals in PGI distributions for cardiovascular disease and education created with different construction methods and discovery samples are highly unstable. Hence, current PGIs lack the desired precision to be used routinely for personalized intervention.

With the world expansion of education, mothers have an increasingly important role in shaping the educational status of their children, particularly for daughters and in contexts with a high prevalence of mothers who are paired with a less-educated father.

Human language processing is poorly matched by artificial intelligence algorithms. We analysed fMRI brain recordings of 304 participants while they listened to short stories and compared brain activations to artificial intelligence algorithms. Unlike such algorithms, we found that the human brain operates with a hierarchy of predictions that anticipate incoming words and phrases.

Are people unwilling or unable to engage with information that runs against the views of their party? Tappin et al. push against this notion with a survey experiment that shows the public responds to counter-partisan policy arguments by changing their minds about these issues, even when they also see where party leaders stand on them.

Predicting the future is something that humans have tried to do — in various ways — for a very long time. A paper by Grossmann et al. tests the ability of social scientists to predict societal change and finds that they are not particularly good at it.

Biased research is wasteful, undermines the credibility of science and prevents cumulative knowledge. Hardwicke and Wagenmakers explain how preregistration, when carefully and transparently used, can help to reduce bias.

The global increase in violence against women during the COVID-19 pandemic has been termed the ‘shadow pandemic’. A study by Ravindran and Shah analysed evidence of violence against women in Indian society and find that, under strict lockdown rules, domestic violence and cybercrime complaints increased, whereas rape and sexual assault decreased.