Volume 9 Issue 8, August 2025

Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to understanding and addressing complex public health challenges. On the basis of complex systems science, we suggest actions that public health funders, institutions and researchers can take to fully engage in interdisciplinary work.

Neglected tropical diseases affect more than a billion people worldwide, cause ill health and perpetuate cycles of poverty. Behavioural change can help, particularly through hygiene. But to achieve this we first need to understand the complex circumstances that mean hygiene is not always prioritized.

A negative relationship with caregivers early in life known as ‘disorganized attachment’ has disruptive long-term consequences in humans. Rolland et al. find no evidence for this relationship pattern in free (that is, wild) chimpanzees in their natural environment, which underscores its maladaptive nature and indicates the role of context in shaping caregiver–infant relations.

People not only inhabit social networks, but also form beliefs about their social world. We assessed these beliefs in isolated villages in Honduras, and found that individuals overestimated kinship ties in their social networks, misperceived ties across social and economic lines, and exhibited perceptual biases that systematically varied.

Surveys in 20 countries reveal strong public support for global policies such as a tax on millionaires to finance low-income countries or a carbon price to finance a global basic income. Survey experiments in Western countries confirm that support is sincere and that citizens prefer political platforms that include global redistribution policies.

A cooperative online quiz game called Tango reduced partisan animosity, improved democracy-related attitudes and was rated as highly enjoyable by participants. The effects of the quiz game were durable and persisted up to four months, and they were similar for Republican and Democrat players.

Genome-wide association studies of monozygotic twins revealed genes associated with psychiatric and neurodevelopmental traits that are environmentally sensitive, which means their function might depend on environmental factors such as stress.

Although many believe our moral circles expand with age, this Perspective discusses an early-emerging tendency to care for others.

Contemporary information systems face growing public distrust across a range of issues including public health, election integrity and climate. This Perspective introduces the Community-Centered Exploration, Engagement, and Evaluation system to help detect and mitigate potential information harms, integrating community participation and response at its core.

Neglected tropical diseases impose severe health, social and economic burdens on millions in impoverished regions. This narrative Review examines current interventions and highlights the role of human behaviour and community engagement and involvement in driving intervention success, sustainability and ownership within communities.

This study of 50 wild Western chimpanzee mother–offspring dyads revealed no evidence of disorganized attachment. Instead, offspring exhibited secure-like and insecure avoidant-like behaviours during threats, consistent with the theory that attachment is an adaptive trait.

Fabre et al. demonstrate widespread support for global redistributive and climate policies through surveys across 20 countries. This support is shown to be sincere, as confirmed by follow-up survey experiments in Western countries.

Social comparison is frequently used as a behaviour change technique. This meta-analysis of 79 randomized controlled trials found a significant effect of social comparison as a behaviour change technique on behaviours related to health, performance, service and the environment.

Collecting an extensive publicly available dataset on four inhibitory control tasks, Gratton et al. show that more than 1,000 trials per participant are necessary to reduce within-participant variability and improve the reliability of the congruency effect.

Across five randomized controlled trials, Woodley et al. find that a cooperative online quiz game reduced partisan animosity, improved democracy-related attitudes and was highly enjoyable. Effects persisted for up to four months.

Salvi et al. find that GPT-4 outperforms humans in debates when given basic sociodemographic data. With personalization, GPT-4 had 81.2% higher odds of post-debate agreement than humans.

PIGEON is a statistical framework that uses summary statistics from genome-wide interaction studies to estimate how genes and environments jointly influence human complex traits.

Tu et al. find inequalities in access to economic, social and environmental infrastructure across 166 countries. Regional disparities and their association with health outcomes underscore the need for equitable infrastructure development.

This study uncovered genetic associations with environmental sensitivity in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental traits in an international collaboration using data from more than 21,000 monozygotic twins—the largest genetic study of monozygotic twin differences to date.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is clinically heterogeneous, with ongoing debates about phenotypic differences between boys and girls. Leveraging the Get SET Early programme, Pierce and colleagues find no statistically significant sex differences in toddlers with ASD across 17 of 18 measures, including symptom severity, receptive and expressive language, and social attention.

Fillingim et al. show that biological and psychosocial factors jointly predict conditions associated with chronic pain.

Fridman, Khazeeva et al. show associations of reproductive phenotypes and educational attainment in heterozygotic carriers of pathogenic variants associated with recessive conditions.

Feltham et al. develop a sampling strategy to evaluate social network cognition across 82 Honduran villages, systematically mapping the underlying village networks.