Social sciences, psychology, economics and the humanities.
Wild chimpanzees with overlapping visual gestures appeared to share repertoires for reasons beyond repeated exposure and reinforcement. The findings are more consistent with the idea that cues such as vocalizations, gestures and waiting for a response help chimpanzees infer communicative goals in uncertain social situations.
A research note examines how professional musicians in Athens were compelled to perform partisan music during Greece’s National Schism from 1915 to 1922. It introduces “acoustic coercion” to describe how informal violence and economic pressure can enforce political conformity in sound.
A study of 46 adults describes “rosters” as a relationship form involving multiple concurrent, non-committed partners arranged in an informal hierarchy. Participants said rosters could provide sex, validation, emotional support and protection against uncertainty, while strategic communication helped sustain them.
Planning an action without carrying it out can still leave a memory trace. In two experiments, people were more likely to mistakenly recognize configurations from an unchosen solution path than genuinely new configurations.
A study tested whether an AI language model could distinguish factual accuracy from the appearance of credibility. The model often gave fabricated texts fairly high reliability scores, although a separate test of whether claims matched external facts performed better.
A preregistered study comparing human-only pairs with pairs made up of a person and GPT-4o found that human teams produced more original and diverse ideas. The AI appeared to contribute an advantage mainly by generating longer responses, while its human partners gave less creative responses than people collaborating with other humans.
Children became less effective at learning patterns as they grew from age 7 to 14, according to a longitudinal study. The decline was associated with higher levels of executive functions, the mental abilities used for goal-directed behavior.
A study comparing Kazakhstan, the United States, Germany and India examines when online harassment may lead to criminal liability in cases involving suicide. It finds that digital records can help establish authorship, knowledge, sequence, autonomy and causation, but their effect depends on the law being applied.
German minimum-wage episodes and strikes provide evidence that changes in wage bargaining power can affect unemployment and inflation. The study finds that these shocks pass substantially through to prices and help explain broader economic fluctuations.
A new theory links the origins of spoken language to storytelling around fires, rather than mainly to the practical needs of daily life. It suggests that firelight may have helped move communication from gestures tied to immediate experience toward speech capable of describing distant times, places and imagined social worlds.
The article examines what happens when expanded marriage rights for same-sex couples meet increasingly restrictive rules for moving across borders with family members. It argues that studying these cases together can reveal limits in both family migration research and research on LGBTQI+ migration.
Richmond’s Peacemaker Fellowship was associated with a 61.47% reduction in fatal and nonfatal firearm assaults over 14 years, compared with a weighted group of similar US cities. The reduction appeared to grow after the program expanded, but the study cannot establish that the program alone caused the decline.
A qualitative study of queer Ukrainian refugees in four EU countries found that legal recognition of same-sex relationships rarely determined where people first went. It became more important later, affecting family security, institutional recognition and whether people felt able to live openly.
A study of East European queer migrants in Scotland before Brexit examined how migration status and social class shaped couples’ access to LGBTQIA+ family rights. Mixed-status couples faced difficult borders and had to work toward legal recognition, while EU migrant couples generally benefited from greater mobility rights.
Migration can make populations more similar, but its effect on culture depends on how people adopt common behaviors or beliefs. A simulation found that strong conformity can preserve or increase cultural differences, especially when migration is limited.
