Pub Date : 2025-12-08DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02358-4
James N Druckman,Katherine Ognyanova,Alauna Safarpour,Jonathan Schulman,Kristin Lunz Trujillo,Ata Aydin Uslu,Jon Green,Matthew A Baum,Alexi Quintana-Mathé,Hong Qu,Roy H Perlis,David M J Lazer
Scientists provide important information to the public. Whether that information influences decision-making depends on trust. In the USA, gaps in trust in scientists have been stable for 50 years: women, Black people, rural residents, religious people, less educated people and people with lower economic status express less trust than their counterparts (who are more represented among scientists). Here we probe the factors that influence trust. We find that members of the less trusting groups exhibit greater trust in scientists who share their characteristics (for example, women trust women scientists more than men scientists). They view such scientists as having more benevolence and, in most cases, more integrity. In contrast, those from high-trusting groups appear mostly indifferent about scientists' characteristics. Our results highlight how increasing the presence of underrepresented groups among scientists can increase trust. This means expanding representation across several divides-not just gender and race/ethnicity but also rurality and economic status.
{"title":"Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA.","authors":"James N Druckman,Katherine Ognyanova,Alauna Safarpour,Jonathan Schulman,Kristin Lunz Trujillo,Ata Aydin Uslu,Jon Green,Matthew A Baum,Alexi Quintana-Mathé,Hong Qu,Roy H Perlis,David M J Lazer","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02358-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02358-4","url":null,"abstract":"Scientists provide important information to the public. Whether that information influences decision-making depends on trust. In the USA, gaps in trust in scientists have been stable for 50 years: women, Black people, rural residents, religious people, less educated people and people with lower economic status express less trust than their counterparts (who are more represented among scientists). Here we probe the factors that influence trust. We find that members of the less trusting groups exhibit greater trust in scientists who share their characteristics (for example, women trust women scientists more than men scientists). They view such scientists as having more benevolence and, in most cases, more integrity. In contrast, those from high-trusting groups appear mostly indifferent about scientists' characteristics. Our results highlight how increasing the presence of underrepresented groups among scientists can increase trust. This means expanding representation across several divides-not just gender and race/ethnicity but also rurality and economic status.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145704514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-05DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02345-9
David Rose, Siying Zhang, Shaun Nichols, Ellen M. Markman, Tobias Gerstenberg
{"title":"How children map causal verbs to different causes across development","authors":"David Rose, Siying Zhang, Shaun Nichols, Ellen M. Markman, Tobias Gerstenberg","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02345-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02345-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"130 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145680108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-05DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02376-2
Laurel Raffington
Working in academia can be stressful. Laurel Raffington suggests treating it as ‘just a job’ to reduce performance pressure and advocate for structural improvements.
{"title":"Academia is just a job","authors":"Laurel Raffington","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02376-2","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41562-025-02376-2","url":null,"abstract":"Working in academia can be stressful. Laurel Raffington suggests treating it as ‘just a job’ to reduce performance pressure and advocate for structural improvements.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"10 1","pages":"3-3"},"PeriodicalIF":15.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145680223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-05DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02375-3
Mindy Nunez Duffourc, Falk Gerrik Verhees, Stephen Gilbert
{"title":"Artificial intelligence characters are dangerous without legal guardrails","authors":"Mindy Nunez Duffourc, Falk Gerrik Verhees, Stephen Gilbert","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02375-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02375-3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"88 8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145680222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-05DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02382-4
Humans are a social species, and one expression of this is prosocial behaviour: we often behave in ways that do not directly benefit ourselves, but others. On International Volunteer Day, we are launching a Collection on prosocial behaviour to celebrate its importance as a core human behaviour.
{"title":"Celebrating prosocial behaviour on International Volunteer Day","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02382-4","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41562-025-02382-4","url":null,"abstract":"Humans are a social species, and one expression of this is prosocial behaviour: we often behave in ways that do not directly benefit ourselves, but others. On International Volunteer Day, we are launching a Collection on prosocial behaviour to celebrate its importance as a core human behaviour.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"9 12","pages":"2405-2406"},"PeriodicalIF":15.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.nature.comhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02382-4.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145674440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-25DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02365-5
Christopher Opie, Quentin D. Atkinson
The invention of agriculture is widely thought to have spurred the emergence of large-scale human societies. It has since been argued that only intensive agriculture can provide enough surplus for emerging states. Others have proposed it was the taxation potential of cereal grains that enabled the formation of states, making writing a critical development for recording those taxes. Here we test these hypotheses by mapping trait data from 868 cultures worldwide onto a language tree representing the relationships between cultures globally. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses indicate that intensive agriculture was as likely the result of state formation as its cause. By contrast, grain cultivation most likely preceded state formation. Grain cultivation also predicted the subsequent emergence of taxation. Writing, although not lost once states were formed, more likely emerged in tax-raising societies, consistent with the proposal that it was adopted to record those taxes. Although consistent with theory, a causal interpretation of the associations we identify is limited by the assumptions of our phylogenetic model, and several of the results are less reliable owing to the small sample size of some of the cross-cultural data we use. Opie and Atkinson conduct a global phylogenetic analysis of 868 cultures and find evidence indicating that cereal grain cultivation, not agricultural surplus, drove state formation. Their findings also link taxation and writing to state emergence.
{"title":"State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing","authors":"Christopher Opie, Quentin D. Atkinson","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02365-5","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41562-025-02365-5","url":null,"abstract":"The invention of agriculture is widely thought to have spurred the emergence of large-scale human societies. It has since been argued that only intensive agriculture can provide enough surplus for emerging states. Others have proposed it was the taxation potential of cereal grains that enabled the formation of states, making writing a critical development for recording those taxes. Here we test these hypotheses by mapping trait data from 868 cultures worldwide onto a language tree representing the relationships between cultures globally. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses indicate that intensive agriculture was as likely the result of state formation as its cause. By contrast, grain cultivation most likely preceded state formation. Grain cultivation also predicted the subsequent emergence of taxation. Writing, although not lost once states were formed, more likely emerged in tax-raising societies, consistent with the proposal that it was adopted to record those taxes. Although consistent with theory, a causal interpretation of the associations we identify is limited by the assumptions of our phylogenetic model, and several of the results are less reliable owing to the small sample size of some of the cross-cultural data we use. Opie and Atkinson conduct a global phylogenetic analysis of 868 cultures and find evidence indicating that cereal grain cultivation, not agricultural surplus, drove state formation. Their findings also link taxation and writing to state emergence.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"10 1","pages":"156-163"},"PeriodicalIF":15.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.nature.comhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02365-5.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145593435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-24DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02336-w
Richard Futrell, Michael Hahn
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words that are combined to form phrases. Here we show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a statistical measure of complexity called predictive information, also known as excess entropy. Predictive information is the mutual information between the past and future of a stochastic process. In simulations, we find that codes that minimize predictive information break messages into groups of approximately independent features that are expressed systematically and locally, corresponding to words and phrases. Next, drawing on cross-linguistic text corpora, we find that actual human languages are structured in a way that yields low predictive information compared with baselines at the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexical semantics. Our results establish a link between the statistical and algebraic structure of language and reinforce the idea that these structures are shaped by communication under general cognitive constraints.
{"title":"Linguistic structure from a bottleneck on sequential information processing","authors":"Richard Futrell, Michael Hahn","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02336-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02336-w","url":null,"abstract":"Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words that are combined to form phrases. Here we show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a statistical measure of complexity called predictive information, also known as excess entropy. Predictive information is the mutual information between the past and future of a stochastic process. In simulations, we find that codes that minimize predictive information break messages into groups of approximately independent features that are expressed systematically and locally, corresponding to words and phrases. Next, drawing on cross-linguistic text corpora, we find that actual human languages are structured in a way that yields low predictive information compared with baselines at the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexical semantics. Our results establish a link between the statistical and algebraic structure of language and reinforce the idea that these structures are shaped by communication under general cognitive constraints.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145583047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-24DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02350-y
Elliot Howard-Spink, Claudio Tennie, Tatang Mitra Setia, Deana Perawati, Carel van Schaik, Brendan Barrett, Andrew Whiten, Caroline Schuppli
Humans accumulate extensive repertoires of culturally transmitted information, reaching breadths exceeding any individual’s innovation capacity (culturally dependent repertoires). It is unclear whether other animals require social learning to acquire adult-like breadths of information in the wild, including by key developmental milestones, or whether animals are capable of constructing their knowledge repertoires primarily through independent exploration. We investigated whether social learning mediates orangutans’ diet-repertoire development, by translating an extensive dataset describing wild orangutans’ behaviour into an empirically validated agent-based model. In this model, diets reliably developed to adult-like breadths only when simulated immatures benefited from multiple forms of social learning. Moreover, social learning was required for diets to reach adult-like breadths by the age immatures become independent from their mothers. This implies that orangutan diets constitute culturally dependent repertoires, with social learning enhancing the rate and outcomes of diet development past individual potentials. We discuss prospective avenues for researching the building of cultural repertoires in hominids and other species.
{"title":"Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials","authors":"Elliot Howard-Spink, Claudio Tennie, Tatang Mitra Setia, Deana Perawati, Carel van Schaik, Brendan Barrett, Andrew Whiten, Caroline Schuppli","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02350-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02350-y","url":null,"abstract":"Humans accumulate extensive repertoires of culturally transmitted information, reaching breadths exceeding any individual’s innovation capacity (culturally dependent repertoires). It is unclear whether other animals require social learning to acquire adult-like breadths of information in the wild, including by key developmental milestones, or whether animals are capable of constructing their knowledge repertoires primarily through independent exploration. We investigated whether social learning mediates orangutans’ diet-repertoire development, by translating an extensive dataset describing wild orangutans’ behaviour into an empirically validated agent-based model. In this model, diets reliably developed to adult-like breadths only when simulated immatures benefited from multiple forms of social learning. Moreover, social learning was required for diets to reach adult-like breadths by the age immatures become independent from their mothers. This implies that orangutan diets constitute culturally dependent repertoires, with social learning enhancing the rate and outcomes of diet development past individual potentials. We discuss prospective avenues for researching the building of cultural repertoires in hominids and other species.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145582928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-21DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02355-7
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.
{"title":"Shared universal pressures in the evolution of human languages","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02355-7","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41562-025-02355-7","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"10 1","pages":"16-17"},"PeriodicalIF":15.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145559899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-20DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02344-w
Sarker Masud Parvez
{"title":"Electronic waste is a public health crisis that demands urgent action","authors":"Sarker Masud Parvez","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02344-w","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41562-025-02344-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"9 11","pages":"2215-2216"},"PeriodicalIF":15.9,"publicationDate":"2025-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145555752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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