Articles

What role do interest groups play in environmental policy? Orach et al. find that coalition-building among interest groups in response to a perceived crisis can delay or prevent resource collapses, even when competing interest coalitions have unequal resources.

A new study shows that chimpanzees possess a highly diverse culture of termite fishing that differs strongly among groups. Individuals copy group-specific techniques, and their combinations, with high conformity to maintain a unique group culture.

Prosocial behaviours are ubiquitous in nature. These building blocks of cooperative societies can come in many forms, depending on how the underlying social good is produced and distributed. In this study, the authors show that heterogeneous populations can strongly promote the evolution of prosocial behaviours. However, this efficient evolution reveals a thorny side of prosocial behaviours: they generate the possibility of widespread wealth inequality, even to the point of being a detriment to the poorest in the population. The authors provide a general framework that can be used to understand when this harmful prosociality will emerge in a population. These findings suggest that institutional interventions are often essential for maintaining equitable outcomes in heterogeneous societies.

Using large-scale data, Kraemer et al. find that human mobility patterns vary across the globe and in scale by environmental and sociodemographic contexts. There are tenfold differences in mobility patterns depending on the countries’ economic development.

In a cohort of 1,196 children followed to age 29 years, the authors found that risk of psychopathology was more strongly associated with subjective recall of childhood maltreatment histories than with objective, court-documented evidence of maltreatment.

In a sample of over 4,000 participants from 19 countries, the core patterns from a highly influential study on behaviour and decision-making broadly replicate, with only minor exceptions and somewhat smaller effect sizes.

Fewlass et al. recover dairy residues from hunter-gatherer pottery from highland Lesotho dating from mid-to-late first millennium ad, which implies ongoing contact between these groups and coastal agriculturalists not long after they first arrived in southern Africa.

Adolescents are prone to risky decisions. In a two-step approach, splitting a database of adolescents’ responses in a foraging task into discovery and confirmation samples, Bach et al. show that sex is the largest predictor of risky decisions.

Pierson et al. compiled and analysed a dataset detailing nearly 100 million traffic stops conducted across the United States, finding evidence of persistent racial bias against black and Hispanic drivers in police stops and search decisions.

How efficiently humans make perceptual decisions varies between people. Based on EEG and structural and functional MRI data, Brosnan et al. suggest a role for dorsal frontoparietal network connectivity in the speed of perceptual decisions.

Halai et al. report a systematic comparison of machine learning algorithms that predict the speech impairments of aphasia patients from brain scans, identifying which algorithms and types of neuroimaging data improve predictions of behavioural outcomes.

Using data from more than 370,000 individuals on the HEXACO-100 personality measure, Jose Espinoza and colleagues find that five profiles of the HEXACO-PI-R traits replicate robustly across multiple independent samples, and across age and gender.

Jachimowicz et al. find that increased income inequality increases financial hardship particularly for individuals with low income, in part by weakening the community buffer that could otherwise offer support.

Ludyga and colleagues show that sex, exercise type and dose influence the benefits of exercise for cognition. These benefits can be optimized by paying attention to sex-specific differences in the role of exercise intensity and its progression.

In two functional MRI studies in which participants pay for the revelation of the solutions to magic tricks and trivia questions by risking electric shocks, Lau et al. show that curiosity-driven decisions involve activity in the striatum.

Small, portable artworks have been missing from the archaeological record of the earliest Homo sapiens of Southeast Asia–Australasia. New excavations in Sulawesi have uncovered stone engravings of the natural world dating back to 26–14 ka.

Piff and Wiwad et al. find that attributing poverty to situational forces is associated with greater concern for inequality, and three experiments reveal that increasing situational attributions for poverty motivates egalitarianism up to 5 months later.

Hunter movements have implications for how to control emerging wildlife diseases. In northern Europe, hunter residential densities are more closely linked to human than prey density, hunters are largely migratory, and they aggregate with increasing regional prey densities.

Guess, Nyhan and Reifler find that untrustworthy websites made up a small share of people’s information diets before the 2016 US election and were largely consumed by a subset of Americans with strong preferences for pro-attitudinal information.

Malhotra and colleagues find that exposure to the economic benefits associated with the presence of higher socioeconomic status immigrants, such as the receipt of large inflows of foreign capital, can reduce xenophobic and antiforeigner sentiment.