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This ongoing Series of ‘How to’ Comments offers expert guidance and recommendations on a wide range of topics relevant to the broad readership of Nature Human Behaviour.
human hand and digital hand hold a square with dialog bubbles on the sides between them
This conference will explore the intersection of human cognition, mental health and artificial intelligence, bringing together researchers from diverse fields, including psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, sociology, cultural evolution, and beyond.
plastic water bottle on the ground with flowers growing out of it
Waste is a human-made crisis that has far-reaching consequences for human health, global inequity, and social development. In this focus issue, our authors tell human stories, confront systematic injustices, and picture pathways to turn this challenge into an opportunity for a fairer future.
People can form emotional bonds with AI companions. Using two AI product updates as natural experiments and combining with survey evidence, De Freitas et al. show that changes to AI companions can elicit attachment-related loss and restoration desires.
Cimpian et al. demonstrate disparities in representation by gender and LGBTQ+ identity across US college majors and levels of academic achievement. They identify an in-group advantage among lower-achieving students.
Across more than 1.6 million posts on Twitter, Reddit and 8chan, Candia et al. find that moral language is associated with higher engagement up to a measurable sweet spot. Beyond it, moral saturation is linked to lower engagement.
Bagautdinova et al. study how white matter tracts are organized along the brain’s hierarchy and how they connect diverse biological environments to support complex human cognition and neurodevelopment.
What is the relationship between life satisfaction and social technology use? That is the question of the current research. Using five waves of panel data on self-reported use of ten common social technologies measured and life satisfaction, the authors found only scant evidence of a meaningful relationship between social technology use and subsequent life satisfaction.
Ke et al. show that the resting brain is not idle: spontaneous thoughts can be decoded from brain network dynamics, helping explain why resting functional brain organization relates to everyday cognition, traits and behaviour.
Gender polarization in fields such as engineering or nursing has served as a barrier to students whose genders do not conform to these norms. Cimpian et al. demonstrate that this polarization also protects lower-performing students who do conform, while impeding LGBTQ+ students in male-dominated fields.
In this Perspective, Haubrock et al. argue that today’s scientific structures constrain creativity and that strategic conformity is a rational response. They discuss how this holds back early-career researchers from reaching their full potential as scientists.
Using large language models and experimental methods, this study investigates the prevalence and impact of overreaching causal claims in the social sciences. The results show that these claims are common and are increasing over time, and that they can affect readers’ interpretation, in both humans and large language models.
In this Perspective, the authors examine how behavioural and social sciences studied human behaviour during COVID-19. They argue that these fields adopted a narrow definition of rational behaviour in response to COVID-19, which limited the scope of inquiry, and propose directions for future research.
Large language models (LLMs) used as writing assistants homogenize writing style. Studies across 880,000 texts show that, following the release of ChatGPT, writing became less varied as artificial intelligence (AI) use spread. The LLMs preserved meaning but compressed the variety of language and biased author traits inferred from the words.
Paying people for their biometrics raises complex ethical and legal questions about consent, privacy and the long-term risks of handing over irrevocable personal data. This Comment examines why such models require caution and what safeguards could better protect the public.
Code underlying published findings in the social sciences often fails to reproduce reported results when others re-run it on the original data. This Comment proposes four recommendations to strengthen computational reproducibility, facilitating the trustworthiness and reliability of research.
Across the behavioural sciences, artificial intelligence (AI) will speed up research that is digitally accessible, scalable and often Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD). But evidence about human behaviour cannot always be scaled. We need to connect rapid, automated work with slower research in real settings.
Climate change and misinformation are interconnected global crises shaped by tensions between individual, collective and vested interests. Drawing on climate psychology, we distil six insights for misinformation research to strengthen policy relevance, systems thinking and resilience to attacks.