News & Comment

In this Comment, the authors argue that misplaced distrust leads citizens to dismiss legitimate leaders, experts, or groups. This distrust may be fueled by prejudice or misinformation, and political rhetoric and has moral and democratic consequences.

AI’s greatest strength—removing friction from work and relationships—is also a liability. Prioritizing outcome over process, it eliminates desirable difficulties that drive growth. By subtracting effort from life, AI risks removing the struggles that teach us, the loneliness that connects us, and the labor that makes life meaningful.

The rush to study generative AI is producing a feedback loop of topical and methodological convergence, flattening scientific imagination and crowding out the pluralism needed to keep research adaptive, resilient, and intellectually generative.

Economic inequality is on the rise, and children will bear its burden. Yet children’s perspectives are rarely considered. We urgently need interdisciplinary research to better understand how inequality gets into children’s heads and under their skins, and to inform policies that center children’s lived experiences.

Prevailing interventions against misinformation emphasize truth detection, but offer no panacea. Research into decision-making suggests that strengthening people’s ability to estimate the plausibility of information and to calibrate their confidence under uncertainty might offer a complementary route.

Online and offline, we are surrounded by recommendations on how to improve our health and extend our longevity. Ideally, this health advice is grounded in science. Health psychology plays a distinct role, complimenting research in public health and epidemiology to improve practical insights.

LLM agents can now pass as human participants, threatening the validity of online social science. We urge a shift from ad-hoc checks to multi-layered, adaptive defenses, borrowing from internet anti-bot practice, and call for cooperation across researchers, platforms, and institutions, to guard against this challenge.

This Comment advocates promoting children’s psychological agency to building climate resilience. This approach includes physical and digital climate learning, engaging families, educators, and communities to empower children and provide emotional support.

Consciousness Science is entering an age of unprecedented opportunity, thanks to recent empirical and theoretical advances, increasing interest in the topic, and technological advances in neuroscience. The role theories will play in a maturing science of consciousness deserves a closer look.

Consciousness research has long been dominated by competing grand theories, yet consensus remains elusive. We propose shifting focus toward construct-based, data-driven, and iterative approaches that identify the empirical building blocks of conscious experience and provide a more cumulative, integrative path forward for the field.

Why do many citizens of Western Europe appear complacent about their societies’ democratic backsliding? One explanation is the effect of personal experience on risk perception: a stable democratic past lulls humans into a false sense of security.

A large multi-lab replication study confirms that rhythmic sounds can entrain perceptual performance, while revealing substantial inter-individual variability.

Self-promotional language may attract readers but is discouraged in Communications Psychology. Because style matters in fostering credibility.

Psychology is committed to the principle of nonmaleficence. This Comment argues that psychology as a discipline and psychological associations as its representatives should uphold their ethical responsibility

When communicating psychological intervention research, two pernicious tendencies have become prominent: using imprecise terms with lay meanings and sensationalizing outcome descriptions. This Comment examines the consequences of these communication styles and proposes strategies for effective communication, ensuring enthusiasm does not come at the cost of credibility.

Widespread belief in unfounded conspiracy theories is a risk. Yet, academics also mustn’t commit the reverse error, in adopting a Protective Conspiracy Framing and labelling credible theories and proposals conspiracies when these would deserve scientific scrutiny.

Misinformation is often framed as a cognitive failure, focusing on the vulnerabilities of those who believe it. But misinformation often stems from deliberate disinformation campaigns—which should be considered proactive intergroup aggression.

Dogs have worked and lived with humans for thousands of generations. Modern dogs’ looks and behaviour differ substantially from wolves’. A study in Journal of Neuroscience compares the behaviour and brains of modern and pre-modern dogs to understand the course of wolf-to-dog domestication.

Communications Psychology promotes psychological research that reaches beyond its boundaries. Empirical Work can speak to psychological theory and constructs or explore psychological processes using any of a vast array of data and analysis methods. Whether a study belongs in Communications Psychology does not depend on the type of data that are used; but on whether the data are of high quality, appropriately analyzed, and can answer the psychological research question.

The use of social media field experiments has led to calls for revised ethical guidelines—but none have stuck. A participatory governance approach, similar to developments in AI, can improve practices and collectively align the interests of researchers, platforms and users.