Volume 9 Issue 9, September 2025

Designing good research questions goes well beyond the standard definitions of clarity, focus and tractability, and even beyond ‘novelty’ in the strictest sense. This Comment describes the iterative creative process for designing good research questions, and includes practical suggestions and ways to avoid common traps.

Although individualism and isolated work remain common in academia, coordination offers substantial benefits. This Comment calls on researchers, funders, policymakers, journals and universities to create systemic change towards greater coordination in science.

Behaviour change interventions that are unsuccessful may often be limited by structural constraints. Accumulating evidence across contexts helps to diagnose these barriers. Policymakers should combine structural and behavioural insights to enact systemic reforms to better address environmental and societal challenges.

We estimate the causal effects of following the news on social media by randomly assigning participants to follow either news or non-news accounts on social media. Participants who followed news accounts became more knowledgeable, better able to distinguish true from false news, and more trusting of the news.

Conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking are becoming an increasing concern for researchers, politicians and policymakers. In this Perspective, the authors examine the evidence for how conspiracy beliefs affect sustainability beliefs and attitudes.

In this Perspective, Götz et al. propose the unifying Geographical–Psychological Interactionist Framework, which aims to integrate psychology and geography to account for the context in which human behaviour takes place.

Physical inactivity is a major public health concern. This Perspective advocates for a complex systems approach to physical activity, emphasizing dynamic, interdisciplinary strategies to design more effective, theory-informed interventions.

Recent estimates indicate that half of Ethiopian girls aged 15–19 years have experienced female genital mutilation/cutting (FGMC). This socio-centric social network study estimates the social influence and social selection on preference for cutting female relatives using data from 5,163 Ethiopian Arsi Oromo adults. They find no clear evidence of social selection within marriage-advice networks, suggesting that these networks are not implicated in FGMC maintenance.

An analysis of nearly 100,000 academics on Twitter reveals strong progressive stances on climate and social issues, driven by a small, vocal subset. The study highlights potential gaps between academic voices and public discourse.

Altay et al. show that following the news on social media increases current affairs knowledge, the ability to discern true from false news and trust in the news.

Goel et al. examine why some factually correct news articles are often shared by users who also shared fake news articles on social media.

Johnson and Obradovich report that widely used large language models, including the early text-davinci-003 and GPT-4, regularly produce text completions that simulate behaviour reminiscent of altruism.

Xu et al. find that large language models not only align with human representations in non-sensorimotor domains but also diverge in sensorimotor ones, with additional visual training associated with enhanced alignment.

Linka et al. recorded eye movements of thousands of children and adults viewing scene images in a museum. Adult gaze was marked by well-established spatial and semantic biases. Surprisingly, children deviated from this well into their teenage years.

Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

Ramadan et al. examine how humans deploy hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning strategies given cognitive constraints.

Lee et al. fine-tune large language models on debate data to create belief embeddings that capture the nuanced relationships between a wide range of beliefs, thus offering insight into how people form new beliefs.

Du and Haith show that behaviour can become habitual in two different ways, involving response initiation and response preparation.

Cao et al. show that human amygdala and hippocampus neurons encode visual facial features, bridging perception-driven representations with mnemonic semantic representations.

Lu et al. introduce all-topographic neural networks as a parsimonious model of the human visual cortex.