Reviews & Analysis

Behavioural and complexity sciences have largely proceeded separately in studying social change. By reinterpreting social contagion dynamics through discrete-choice modelling, we demonstrated how thresholds for individual change can be estimated from choice data, and theoretically examined how they can improve interventions for social change.

To study the effects of political advertising, we conducted a field experiment with over 60,000 participants. Removing political advertisements from the Facebook and Instagram feeds of randomly selected participants before the 2020 US election did not have a detectable effect on political knowledge, polarization, turnout or political participation.

By analysing 1.13 million complaint narratives submitted to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), we show that large language model (LLM)-assisted complaints surged after the release of ChatGPT and increased the chances of consumers of receiving relief. Furthermore, consumers with unobserved disadvantages in self-advocacy were found to be more likely to adopt LLMs, which highlights a potential for LLM tools to act as an equalizer.

On discovering that one of the largest prehistoric mass graves of Europe predominantly held violently killed women and children, we used a battery of methods to investigate how this gender-selective and age-selective pattern reflected the strategic disruption of power networks and lineages in the Early Iron Age.

In this Perspective, Househ et al. examine how digital solutions can address pressing needs in mental healthcare, arguing that a patient-centred approach is crucial.

This systematic review and meta-analysis pools results from 93 studies across 45 low- and middle-income countries, and it shows that social safety nets significantly enhance measures of women’s economic achievement and agency. Treatment effects are largest for unconditional cash transfers, public works programmes, social care services and asset transfers.

We show that widely available large language models (LLMs) can — out of the box — accurately score people’s personality traits on the basis of their brief, open-ended narratives. LLM ratings converged with self-reports, predicted daily behaviour and mental health, and outperformed traditional language processing methods. Thus, use of LLM tools emerges as an accurate, scalable and efficient approach to assessing arbitrary psychological constructs.

It is widely believed that language is structured around ‘constituents’, units that combine hierarchically. Using structural priming, we provide evidence of linguistic structures — non-constituents — that do not fit into such hierarchies, which reveals a blind spot in current theories of language and grammar.

Focusing on the Songzhuang cemetery, this study aims to enhance understanding of social diversity in Eastern Zhou society. We adopted a multidisciplinary approach to uncover the profound influence of social inequality within an Eastern Zhou community, and to identify a rare case of social class mobility.

Although navigation and memory are known to be linked in the brain, it is still unknown how a location affects our memory for the objects within it. In an ambitious study that merges virtual reality and brain imaging, Masís-Obando and colleagues discover that places that elicit more stable brain patterns boost the memory for objects put in those places.

Over a decade of data on wild orangutans were used to program an agent-based model of orangutan diet development. Adult-like diets were attainable only if simulated immature individuals learned from others, which indicates that orangutan diets are broader than what any individual could produce independently. Wild orangutan diets therefore represent culturally dependent knowledge repertoires that are produced by social learning.

Automated content moderation systems designed to detect prohibited content on social media often struggle to account for contextual information, which sometimes leads to the erroneous flagging of innocuous content. An experimental study on hate speech reveals how multimodal large language models can facilitate more context-sensitive content moderation on social media.

Battiston et al. discuss the emerging paradigm of higher-order network science and its applications to social systems and human dynamics.

Despite the great diversity of human languages, recurring grammatical patterns (termed ‘universals’) have been found. Using the Grambank database of more than 2,000 languages, spatiophylogenetic analyses reveal that while only a third of 191 putative universals have robust statistical support, there are still preferred feature configurations that have evolved repeatedly — consistent with shared cognitive and communicative pressures having shaped the evolutionary dynamics of languages.

This Perspective urges a shift away from viewing people as ‘consumers’ in circular economy and sustainable waste management research, highlighting a need for human-centred methods to better understand behaviour and drive meaningful change.

We hypothesized that, if the olfactory system involves fine-grained sensorimotor feedback, similarly to what has been observed in other sensory systems, the brain might modulate sniffs in real time according to detailed perceptual features of odours. We analysed more than 13,000 sniffs in response to 160 distinct odours to show that sniff patterns reflect fine-grained perceptual information and are potentially modulated by the amygdala.

Adolescents are especially vulnerable to misinformation but also possess unique strengths. This Perspective outlines a forward-looking research agenda to understand these vulnerabilities and foster resilience through age-appropriate interventions.

Catastrophic forgetting is a common problem for artificial learning systems, but whether it occurs in humans is unclear. We revealed that both humans and neural networks show similar patterns of forgetting, which reflect a fundamental trade-off: reusing prior knowledge speeds up new learning but can corrupt old memories. Individuals differed in how they navigate this balance.

Can loneliness be reduced by changing perceptions of empathy? A large-scale study by Pei et al. shows that people tend to underestimate others’ empathy, and correcting this misconception fosters social connection and increases the formation of friendships.

Tamnes et al. explore the complex relationship between ill-being—including mental and behavioural disorders—and mental well-being.