Volume 7 Issue 2, February 2023

Racism is still rife in predominantly white universities. These will not be safe for Black students until the collective mindset of white campuses changes, argues Walter P. Suza.

Two publications have called for the redefinition of statistical significance as 0.005, or justification of the alpha. We argue that these papers expose a vicious cycle: scientists do not adopt recommendations because they are not standard, and they are not standard because few scientists adopt them. We call on journals and preregistration platforms to mandate alpha-level statements.

High-quality research requires appropriate employment and working conditions for researchers. However, many academic systems rely on short-term employment contracts, biased selection procedures and misaligned incentives, which hinder research quality and progress. We discuss ways to redesign academic systems, emphasizing the role of permanent employment.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), part of the Biden administration, recently announced a major new policy framework which will require all US federally funded research to be made freely available immediately upon publication, at the latest by January 2026. Dr Alondra Nelson, head of the OSTP, talks to Nature Human Behaviour about the background to and implications of this widely discussed decision.

Although we have been able to track how cultural innovations spread among farming populations in prehistoric Europe, we know relatively little about this among European hunter-gatherers. Dolbunova et al. use a range of techniques to shed light on how the making and use of pottery spread among early-to-mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers west of the Urals.

Analysis of pottery made and used by hunter-gatherers in northeastern Europe in the sixth millennium bc supports the existence of super-regional networks enabling cultural transmission long before the arrival of farming.

Using data from 15 countries, Penner et al. find that women earn less than men who are working for the same employer in the same occupation. These results highlight the continued importance of equal pay for equal work.

This research finds that negative adjectives evolve faster over history than positive adjectives, with limited evidence for other parts of speech. Individual people are also more likely to replace negative words than positive words.

Yu et al. examine whether cooking is associated with all-cause and cardiopulmonary mortality. They find that lower mortality risks are associated with cooking with clean fuels, and this may be partly attributed to increased household physical activity.

Kristal et al. find that rewriting a résumé so that previously held jobs are listed with the number of years worked (instead of employment dates) increases callbacks from real employers compared to résumés without employment gaps by approximately 8%.

Goldenberg et al. find that people are attracted to social ties who are more politically extreme, rather than moderate. This tendency, called acrophily, is shown to occur when people select ties on the basis of both emotions and attitudes to political issues.

Henkel et al. show that people’s identification with their COVID-19 vaccination status is associated with polarization in attitudes, behaviours and acceptance of vaccination policies.

‘Vocal bursts’ such as sighs, shrieks and shouts are human emotional vocalizations. In this study, Brooks et al. reveal similarities and differences in the emotional meaning of vocal bursts across five cultures.

Saltoun et al. reveal undescribed brain-wide dimensions to underlie human brain asymmetry at the population level.

In 11,407 children, Baldwin et al. report gene–environment correlations between polygenic scores for psychiatric disorders and adverse childhood experiences, as well as partial genetic confounding of associations between adverse childhood experiences and mental health.