Research Highlight |
Featured
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Comment |
How games can make behavioural science better
Wordle, Minecraft and Scrabble are played online by millions. Gamifying experiments can make behavioural research more inclusive, rigorous and reproducible — if it’s done right.
- Bria Long
- , Jan Simson
- & Samuel A. Mehr
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Article
| Open AccessFinancial incentives for vaccination do not have negative unintended consequences
Findings from large-scale studies in Sweden and the USA indicate that providing financial incentives for vaccination and informing about state incentive programmes do not have any negative unintended consequences.
- Florian H. Schneider
- , Pol Campos-Mercade
- & Armando N. Meier
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Correspondence |
Treating behavioural addictions that lack diagnostic criteria
- Steve Sussman
- & Deborah Louise Sinclair
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Outlook |
Social-media use isn’t always a problem for children
Maartje Boer explains how using social media can be good for young people, and how to spot the warning signs of problematic use.
- Niki Wilson
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Article |
Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic
Vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals across cultures.
- Alexander Bor
- , Frederik Jørgensen
- & Michael Bang Petersen
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Research Briefing |
Genetic risk of smoking and alcohol use examined
In an enormous study of almost 3.4 million individuals from 4 ancestries, variants of more than 2,000 genomic regions were found to be associated with tobacco smoking and alcohol use. Genetic variants that contribute to these behaviours have been identified, and the accuracy of genetic risk scores compared in diverse populations.
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Article
| Open AccessGenetic diversity fuels gene discovery for tobacco and alcohol use
A multi-ancestry meta-regression study analyses diverse genome-wide association studies and genome loci associated with tobacco and alcohol use.
- Gretchen R. B. Saunders
- , Xingyan Wang
- & Scott Vrieze
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Career Feature |
‘Beyond anything I could have imagined’: graduate students speak out about racism
Bias and discrimination are rife in master’s and PhD programmes worldwide, a Nature survey finds.
- Chris Woolston
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Correspondence |
Addiction: expand diagnostic borders with care
- Joël Billieux
- , Maèva Flayelle
- & Daniel L. King
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Research Highlight |
Why are people politically ‘segregated’? Social behaviour holds a clue
People in the United States tend to associate with others who hold views that are similar to their own — but more radical.
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Career Q&A |
Why women aren’t from Venus, and men aren’t from Mars
Neuroscientist Gina Rippon describes how and why she tackled the nature–nurture debate in her book The Gendered Brain, and the media furore it caused.
- Emily Cooke
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Research Highlight |
Dancers pick up the pace on a bass beat — even though it’s inaudible
Concertgoers were not conscious of a low-frequency sound, but grooved more energetically when it played.
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Career Q&A |
How a passion for research could hinder your career and exacerbate inequities in science
Engineer-turned-sociologist Erin Cech describes how she coined the term ‘passion principle’, which challenges the belief that people should love their jobs.
- Jacqui Thornton
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Outlook |
Mastering the art of persuasion during a pandemic
Health policymakers need to cultivate social trust and plan effective communication strategies well before the next infectious disease goes global.
- Elizabeth Svoboda
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Article
| Open AccessGenetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals
Genetic data for 13 Neanderthals from 2 Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia presented provide insights into the social organization of an isolated Neanderthal community at the easternmost extent of their known range.
- Laurits Skov
- , Stéphane Peyrégne
- & Benjamin M. Peter
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Career News |
Getting the job: it’s not just who you know, but how you know them
People are more likely to land high-paying jobs through friends of friends than through their close friends or family, study finds.
- Linda Nordling
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News |
Do soaring energy costs mean we are using less?
Behavioural scientists want to know how much energy people are conserving, and how long new habits will last.
- Heidi Ledford
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Research Highlight |
A restful way to feel more generous: get more sleep
Three sets of data connect lack of sleep with a reduced willingness to help others.
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News & Views |
From the archive: early science in Florence and fingerprint forgery
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News |
Guatemala’s COVID vaccine roll-out failed: here’s what researchers know
Missteps in connecting with Indigenous communities factored into the nation’s low vaccination rate.
- Luke Taylor
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Article
| Open AccessA synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress
An online training module that synergistically targets two different mindsets can reduce stress levels in adolescents in the context of social-evaluative stressors—stressful experiences in which individuals fear that others are judging them negatively.
- David S. Yeager
- , Christopher J. Bryan
- & Jeremy P. Jamieson
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Outlook |
Sniffing out smell’s effects on human behaviour
Olfaction could influence how people respond to threats or select a partner. To investigate, researchers need to design experiments that can capture its effects.
- Michael Eisenstein
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Comment |
Not all inequalities are alike
Better data and new statistical techniques could enable researchers to measure the form of inequality that seems most harmful to society — inequality of opportunity.
- Francisco H. G. Ferreira
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News & Views |
Give physicians’ views to improve COVID vaccine uptake
Informing people once about physicians’ views on COVID-19 vaccination improves vaccination rates by 4 percentage points after 9 months. This finding suggests that light-touch educative nudges can have lasting positive effects.
- Nina Mažar
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Article
| Open AccessCommunicating doctors’ consensus persistently increases COVID-19 vaccinations
Correcting public misperceptions about the views of doctors on the COVID-19 vaccines can have lasting impacts on public uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines.
- Vojtěch Bartoš
- , Michal Bauer
- & Julie Chytilová
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Article |
People construct simplified mental representations to plan
Strategically perceiving and conceiving problems facilitates the effective use of limited cognitive resources.
- Mark K. Ho
- , David Abel
- & Thomas L. Griffiths
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Research Highlight |
Mobile-phone data reveal the acts of war that make people flee
Afghan phone records show that high-casualty events trigger the most internal displacement.
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News & Views |
Virtual collaboration hinders a key component of creativity
Experiments and fieldwork show that teams working together online produce fewer ideas than those collaborating in person — a first step towards answering the question of which modes of communication are generally best for creativity.
- Emőke-Ágnes Horvát
- & Brian Uzzi
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Research Briefing |
Addressing social, psychological and economic barriers helps people out of extreme poverty
Policies that aim to reduce poverty often prioritize economic interventions. We show that a programme that addresses not only financial but also psychological and social barriers is effective at helping extremely poor households in Niger. Our results point to a cost-effective approach for alleviating extreme poverty that can be scaled up using government systems.
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Article
| Open AccessTackling psychosocial and capital constraints to alleviate poverty
Psychosocial measures improve the cost-effectiveness of multi-faceted interventions against extreme poverty.
- Thomas Bossuroy
- , Markus Goldstein
- & Kelsey A. Wright
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Article |
Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation
Videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas, but videoconferencing groups are as effective as (or perhaps even more effective than) in-person groups at deciding which ideas to pursue.
- Melanie S. Brucks
- & Jonathan Levav
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Matters Arising |
Evidence from a statewide vaccination RCT shows the limits of nudges
- Nathaniel Rabb
- , Megan Swindal
- & David Yokum
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Nature Podcast |
Winding roads could make you a better navigator
How where you grew up affects your navigational abilities, and understanding how coastal storm surges are changing.
- Shamini Bundell
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Article |
Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability
An analysis of spatial navigation in nearly 400,000 people shows, by measuring their performance in a video game, that individuals who grew up outside cities are better at navigation than those who grew up in cities.
- A. Coutrot
- , E. Manley
- & H. J. Spiers
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World View |
Study conspiracy theories with compassion
The societal forces that drive people to join a belief system matter more than the specifics of what they believe.
- Elżbieta Drążkiewicz
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News & Views Forum |
Constrained human genes under scrutiny
A higher number of damaging variations in certain genes is associated with an increased likelihood that a man will be childless. A geneticist and an anthropologist discuss what can — and can’t — be learnt from this finding.
- Loic Yengo
- & Heidi Colleran
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Article |
Reduced reproductive success is associated with selective constraint on human genes
Human genetic variants that impair genes that are intolerant of damaging genetic variation are associated with lower reproductive success that is probably mediated by genetically associated cognitive and behavioural traits, particularly in males.
- Eugene J. Gardner
- , Matthew D. C. Neville
- & Matthew E. Hurles
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Research Highlight |
Half a million nights’ sleep reveal 16 kinds of snoozer
Massive sleep database also uncovers four new types of insomnia.
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Article |
Knowledge about others reduces one’s own sense of anonymity
When people learn more about a stranger, they think a stranger knows more about them, and when tested in a field experiment, this shifted residents’ perceptions of police officers’ knowledge of illegal activity.
- Anuj K. Shah
- & Michael LaForest
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Research Highlight |
Short on sleep? Taking a trip could actually help
Travel is a sleep-balancing activity: the tired catch up, and the well-rested become less so.
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Research Briefing |
Ancient DNA illuminates how humans travelled and interacted in Stone Age Africa
Archaeologists have various hypotheses for how populations changed in Africa about 50,000 years ago, during the Later Stone Age transition. Now, the earliest available ancient-DNA sequences from sub-Saharan Africa reveal a complex Late Pleistocene population structure, pointing to large shifts in human movement and in patterns of social interaction.
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Research Briefing |
Social, political and technical feedback processes will drive future climate policies and emissions
Climate policies and greenhouse-gas emissions for the twenty-first century are modelled as the result of coupled feedback effects in the social, political and energy systems. Our models suggest that climate policies will increase in ambition and associated emissions reductions will probably accelerate, resulting in warming of 2 °C to 3 °C above 1880–1910 levels by 2100.
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Research Highlight |
Global survey finds scientists have more credibility than spiritual leaders
A lofty-sounding but vapid statement carried more weight with participants when they were told it came from a scientific source.
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Correspondence |
Emissions cuts take political and social innovation too
- Jonas De keersmaecker
- , Katharina Schmid
- & Sander van der Linden
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News Feature |
The COVID generation: how is the pandemic affecting kids’ brains?
Child-development researchers are asking whether the pandemic is shaping brains and behaviour.
- Melinda Wenner Moyer
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News & Views |
What surveys really say
Increasing the sample size of a survey is often thought to increase the accuracy of the results. However, an analysis of big surveys on the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines shows that larger sample sizes do not protect against bias.
- Frauke Kreuter
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News & Views |
Benefits of megastudies for testing behavioural interventions
Trials of behavioural interventions are hard to compare, hampering policy decision-making. The effects of more than 50 interventions on exercise behaviour have been compared using an experimental design called a megastudy.
- Heather Royer
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Nature Podcast |
How 'megastudies' are changing behavioural science
Speeding up comparisons of behavioural interventions, and what to expect from the James Webb Space Telescope.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Shamini Bundell
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Article |
Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science
A massive field study whereby many different treatments are tested synchronously in one large sample using a common objectively measured outcome, termed a megastudy, was performed to examine the ability of interventions to increase gym attendance by American adults.
- Katherine L. Milkman
- , Dena Gromet
- & Angela L. Duckworth