Social sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mainstream personalization methods rely on centralized Graph Neural Network learning on global graphs, which have considerable privacy risks due to the privacy-sensitive nature of user data. Here, the authors present a federated GNN framework for both effective and privacy-preserving personalization.

    • Chuhan Wu
    • , Fangzhao Wu
    •  & Xing Xie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The integration of risk analysis and spatial CGE modeling frameworks allowed for measuring the direct and indirect consequences of extreme events via novel probabilistic risk indicators which incorporate elements of uncertainty and systemic effects

    • J. A. León
    • , M. Ordaz
    •  & I. F. Araújo

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Economic evaluations of public health interventions to prevent malaria should consider the adoption of wider perspectives and the inclusion of non-health impacts, particularly economic development outcomes, such as education. This is especially relevant in malaria elimination settings and in the context of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

    • Elisa Sicuri
    • , Francesco Ramponi
    •  & Francisco Saúte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continued monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 at the population level is important for identifying at-risk groups. Here the authors analyse data from a serological surveillance platform in San Francisco and find considerable variation in infection and vaccination history by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

    • Isobel Routledge
    • , Saki Takahashi
    •  & Isabel Rodríguez-Barraquer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    ‘Commercial fisheries have decimated keystone species, including oysters in the past 200 years. Here, the authors examine how Indigenous oyster harvest in North America and Australia was managed across 10,000 years, advocating for effective future stewardship of oyster reefs by centering Indigenous peoples.’

    • Leslie Reeder-Myers
    • , Todd J. Braje
    •  & Torben C. Rick

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flow is a desired but elusive state characterized by the subjective experience of immersion and engagement in an activity. Here, the authors develop and empirically validate a formal model that specifies variables and computations involved in the subjective experience of flow.

    • David E. Melnikoff
    • , Ryan W. Carlson
    •  & Paul E. Stillman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Economic shocks may lead to food insecurity and therefore acute child malnutrition (wasting). Here, the authors use data from Demographic Health Surveys to estimate impacts of past economic shocks on wasting and project possible effects of shocks related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

    • Derek D. Headey
    •  & Marie T. Ruel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Uncertainty is a factor in most decisions. Here the authors quantify tolerance for two forms of economic uncertainty—risk and ambiguity—and show that greater lifetime stressor exposure (as assessed by a comprehensive lifetime stressor exposure inventory) was associated with higher aversion to decisions involving ambiguity, but not risk.

    • Candace M. Raio
    • , Benjamin B. Lu
    •  & Paul Glimcher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gambiense human African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness or gHAT) has been targeted for elimination of transmission by 2030. Here, the authors project impacts of gHAT interventions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and derive a priority list of health zones requiring enhanced control to achieve this target.

    • Ching-I Huang
    • , Ronald E. Crump
    •  & Kat S. Rock

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study finds that foreign firms tend to shy away from countries with higher physical climate risks than do local firms. Chinese FDI is significantly more exposed to most physical climate risks than non-Chinese FDI across countries.

    • Xia Li
    •  & Kevin P. Gallagher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    ‘Pre-contact era humans from coastal South America were infected by Mycobacterium pinnipedii, most likely, through contact with infected pinnipeds. Here, the authors investigate the presence of M. pinnipedii in pre-contact era humans from inland South America and explore potential scenarios of human-to-human or animal-mediated transmission.’

    • Åshild J. Vågene
    • , Tanvi P. Honap
    •  & Kirsten I. Bos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Assortative mating could violate the assumption of random mating used in many genetic studies. Here, the authors study more than 25,000 Norwegian families to find genetic similarity between partners, siblings, and in-laws in genetic factors related to educational attainment, height, and depression.

    • Fartein Ask Torvik
    • , Espen Moen Eilertsen
    •  & Eivind Ystrom

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gambiense human African trypanosomiasis has been targeted for elimination of transmission by 2030. Here, the authors assess the cost-effectiveness of elimination strategies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and find that those which lead to elimination of transmission might also be considered cost-effective by conventional thresholds.

    • Marina Antillon
    • , Ching-I Huang
    •  & Fabrizio Tediosi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In many instances of reciprocity, individuals cooperate in turns. Here, the authors analyze the equilibria and the dynamics of such alternating games, and in particular describe all strategies with one-round memory that maintain cooperation.

    • Peter S. Park
    • , Martin A. Nowak
    •  & Christian Hilbe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The M72/AS01E tuberculosis vaccine has shown 50% efficacy in preventing pulmonary TB disease in infected 18–50 year olds. Here, the authors demonstrate that, in most scenarios modelled, vaccination of adolescents would also be cost effective in two high incidence settings, South Africa and India.

    • Rebecca C. Harris
    • , Matthew Quaife
    •  & Richard G. White

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

    • Jay J. Van Bavel
    • , Aleksandra Cichocka
    •  & Paulo S. Boggio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large amounts of interaction data are collected by messaging apps, mobile phone carriers, and social media. Creţu et al. propose a behavioral profiling attack model and show that the stability of people’s interaction networks over time can allow individuals to be re-identified in interaction datasets.

    • Ana-Maria Creţu
    • , Federico Monti
    •  & Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Moving conferences from in-person to virtual and hybrid modes may have emissions reductions benefits. Here the authors find that the switch to virtual and hybrid conferencing reduces the carbon footprint by 94% when it comes to the switch to virtual conferencing, and 67% for hybrid conferences with carefully selected hubs.

    • Yanqiu Tao
    • , Debbie Steckel
    •  & Fengqi You

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous research suggests that, for children and adults, there is an association between better performance on cognitive tests and less functional connectivity between two brain networks. Here, the authors find that this association does not hold in a sample of children from households in poverty, highlighting the need for more diverse samples to incorporate a range of childhood environments in developmental cognitive neuroscience.

    • Monica E. Ellwood-Lowe
    • , Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli
    •  & Silvia A. Bunge

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change will impact the global economy. Here, the authors propose a framework to evaluate its effect on economies across multiple regional and temporal scales, and project decreased financial stability in a northern temperate economy.

    • Kayla Stan
    • , Graham A. Watt
    •  & Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dynamical development process of various social network platforms shows emergence and transformation of user communities. The authors model social network formation processes considering the meritocratic perspective, where users make their decisions based on the user-generated content.

    • Nicolò Pagan
    • , Wenjun Mei
    •  & Florian Dörfler

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Climate change negatively impacts the livelihoods of indigenous communities across the world, including those located on the African continent. This Comment reports on how five African indigenous communities have been impacted by climate change and the adopted adaptation mechanisms.

    • Walter Leal Filho
    • , Newton R. Matandirotya
    •  & Richard Achia Mbih

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Intergenerational preconditions and historical conferment of opportunity play a role in social mobility. This study considers the geography of relative deprivation to show how different family groups across Great Britain experience different intergenerational outcomes.

    • Paul A. Longley
    • , Justin van Dijk
    •  & Tian Lan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences the weather around the world and, therefore, has strong impacts on society. Here, the authors show that ENSO is associated with child nutrition in many countries, with warmer El Niño conditions leading to more child undernutrition in large parts of the developing world.

    • Jesse K. Anttila-Hughes
    • , Amir S. Jina
    •  & Gordon C. McCord

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Scientific revolutions have famously inspired scientists and innovation but large-scale analyses of scientific revolutions in modern science are rare. Here, the authors investigate one possible factor connected with a topic’s extraordinary growth—scientific prizes.

    • Ching Jin
    • , Yifang Ma
    •  & Brian Uzzi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parents’ investments in their children are a critical input in the production of early skills, yet those investments differ across socioeconomic backgrounds. Here the authors show that variations in parental beliefs about the impact of such investments can be one of the sources of investment disparities, and report interventions that can potentially shift those beliefs.

    • John A. List
    • , Julie Pernaudet
    •  & Dana L. Suskind

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Moral judgments depend on relational context, with different normative cooperative expectations – relational norms – embedded in different social relationships, such as parent-child, romantic partners, siblings, or acquaintances. Here, the authors show how relational norms for care, hierarchy, reciprocity, and mating are embedded in a set of everyday social relationships in the United States, and use this information to predict out-of-sample moral judgments in relational context.

    • Brian D. Earp
    • , Killian L. McLoughlin
    •  & Molly J. Crockett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social convention change due to diffusion is often described by agent-based models focusing on the role of social coordination. In this work the authors uncover two additional individual-level mechanisms, trend-seeking and inertia, that can critically shape the collective behavior of the population.

    • Mengbin Ye
    • , Lorenzo Zino
    •  & Ming Cao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integrating river system and economy-wide models in a dynamic, iterative, bidirectional fashion allows assessing some economic impacts of interventions in river systems. Here the authors use this framework to compare water resources management strategies for the Nile in a quest for efficient use of the river’s limited and stressed water resources.

    • Mohammed Basheer
    • , Victor Nechifor
    •  & Julien J. Harou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social media platforms moderating misinformation have been accused of political bias. Here, the authors use neutral social bots to show that, while there is no strong evidence for such a bias, the content to which Twitter users are exposed depends strongly on the political leaning of early Twitter connections.

    • Wen Chen
    • , Diogo Pacheco
    •  & Filippo Menczer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global demand for “blue food” is growing. In this quantitative synthesis, the authors analyse global seafood demand and project trends to 2050, finding considerable regional variation in the relationship between wealth and consumption.

    • Rosamond L. Naylor
    • , Avinash Kishore
    •  & Beatrice Crona

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite their ubiquitous nature across a wide range of creative domains, it remains unclear if there is any regularity underlying the beginning of successful periods in a career. Here, the authors develop computational methods to trace the career outputs of artists, film directors, and scientists and explore how they move in their creative space along their career trajectory.

    • Lu Liu
    • , Nima Dehmamy
    •  & Dashun Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is still unclear when and by which route modern humans expanded out of Africa. Here, Beyer et al. use paleoclimate reconstructions and estimates of human precipitation requirements to evaluate the survivability of spatial and temporal migration corridors to Eurasia over the last 300,000 years.

    • Robert M. Beyer
    • , Mario Krapp
    •  & Andrea Manica

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Globalisation supports the clustering of critical infrastructure systems, sometimes in proximity to lower-magnitude (VEI 3–6) volcanic centres. In this emerging risk landscape, moderate volcanic eruptions might have cascading, catastrophic effects. Risk assessments ought to be considered in this light.

    • Lara Mani
    • , Asaf Tzachor
    •  & Paul Cole

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