{"title":"Use AI to heterogenize science.","authors":"R Hans Phaf","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02618-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02618-x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149224737","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}
{"title":"Trait judgements of faces using a task without word labels","authors":"Yue Xu, Umit Keles, Chujun Lin, Ralph Adolphs","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02605-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02605-2","url":null,"abstract":"People attribute psychological traits to faces. Previous research has typically elicited these judgements using specific words provided in advance by the experimenter (for example, ratings on competence or trustworthiness), raising questions about completeness (these tasks use a limited set of words) and generalizability (for example, across languages). Here we asked over 3,000 participants to spatially arrange unfamiliar faces based on perceived trait similarity, without providing any word labels. Using predominantly White faces, experiment 1 yielded five dimensions that we interpreted as approachability, gender-specific warmth, competence, morality and youthfulness. Using White, Black and Asian faces, experiment 2 also produced five dimensions, which showed prominent effects of stereotypes associated with race. Comparisons with four other studies that used word labels argue that approachability or warmth emerges as a universal evaluative factor that integrates multiple trait facets (such as trustworthiness, warmth and competence) into a single holistic dimension and that race and gender stereotypes emerge depending on the set of face stimuli used.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"179 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149218161","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}
{"title":"The case for AI degrowth.","authors":"Matthias Schmelzer, Steffen Lange","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02617-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02617-y","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149224706","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}
{"title":"Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns","authors":"Zekun Sun, Zhiran Xie, Samuel D. McDougle","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02597-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02597-z","url":null,"abstract":"The ability to abstract the invariant structure of an experience while discarding incidental details underlies generalization across virtually every domain of human cognition, from vision and language to concept learning. Yet whether the motor system generates such abstractions and whether they causally contribute to skilled performance remain open questions. Here we introduce a paradigm in which human participants learned novel movement patterns by precisely copying unfamiliar handwritten characters. To examine the role of motor abstractions in this form of learning, participants were trained on markedly rotated versions of the characters, which recruited substantially different lower-level movements while still maintaining the relevant abstract movement trajectory. Across 11 experiments, abstraction training drove robust performance improvements that were comparable to having repetitive practice on the canonical form of each character. Moreover, this effect was largely motoric in nature: it did not require a visual template, sustained trajectory feedback or mental imagery, and was sensitive to the sequential structure of the movement trajectory. These findings establish a causal role for abstractions in motor learning, revealing that the motor system probably deploys abstractions in the earliest stages of skill acquisition.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149218162","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}
{"title":"Petition style changes with AI writing support but outcomes do not improve.","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02579-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02579-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149183450","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}
{"title":"Recognizing Indigenous peoples.","authors":"Raymond I Orr","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02619-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02619-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149171629","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}
{"title":"Both selfish and prosocial actors distort their impact on others, but selfish-serving spin seems to spread.","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02584-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02584-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149166578","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}
{"title":"Responsibilism and culture.","authors":"Adam B Cohen, Amiryah N Toves","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02616-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02616-z","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149166993","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}
{"title":"Simulated responses from large language models are weak proxies for human economic preferences across 74 countries.","authors":"Fadong Chen, Qijun Wang, Lei Wang, Sudeep Bhatia","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02611-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02611-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Large-scale surveys are central to investigating economic preferences but are costly and slow. Can large language model (LLM)-simulated responses substitute for human survey data? We conducted a virtual Global Preference Survey, simulating six experimentally validated economic preferences for 67,201 matched human respondents across 74 countries. Across 20 LLM configurations with diverse prompts and robustness checks, we found systematic but modest individual-level alignment (87.5% of Spearman correlations have 95% confidence intervals (CIs) above zero), with LLMs recovering the direction of associations in 77.8% (95% CI, (71.6%, 83.1%); CI-based consistency ratio) of gender, age and cognitive-ability dimensions, but only 48.1% (95% CI, (45.1%, 51.2%)) of cultural dimensions. Ablation and error decompositions suggest weaker alignment when removing demographic information than when removing country labels, and in many models alignment is weaker in economically undeveloped and less digitally connected countries. LLM-simulated responses may recover some individual- and group-level patterns but are not yet reliable proxies for cross-national representative surveys in macro-level inference or policy evaluation.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149170063","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}
Tong Gong, Emma Frans, Anna Ohlis, Shuyang Yao, Ruyue Zhang, Anders Nilsson, Yasmina Molero, Miriam A Mosing, Isabell Brikell, Henrik Larsson, Paul Lichtenstein, Lisa B Thorell, Patrik Ke Magnusson, Ralf Kuja-Halkola, Yi Lu
{"title":"Recreational screen use and internalizing problems from preadolescence to young adulthood in a longitudinal twin cohort with co-twin comparison.","authors":"Tong Gong, Emma Frans, Anna Ohlis, Shuyang Yao, Ruyue Zhang, Anders Nilsson, Yasmina Molero, Miriam A Mosing, Isabell Brikell, Henrik Larsson, Paul Lichtenstein, Lisa B Thorell, Patrik Ke Magnusson, Ralf Kuja-Halkola, Yi Lu","doi":"10.1038/s41562-026-02607-0","DOIUrl":"10.1038/s41562-026-02607-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The mental health impact of increasing recreational screen use among youth has raised substantial concerns, yet questions about causality remain unresolved. Here, leveraging a co-twin control design, we examined associations between screen use and internalizing problems from childhood to early adulthood among 21,797 Swedish twins, accounting for shared familial factors. Recreational screen use was associated with increased internalizing symptoms and clinical diagnosed depression and anxiety. However, these associations were substantially attenuated within discordant twin pairs and did not remain statistically significant after correction for multiple testing. These findings suggest that shared genetic and environmental factors partly explain the association between youth screen use and mental health. Although co-twin estimates provided limited evidence for clear causal effects, the association between heavy interactive screen use and clinical risk highlights the need to understand potential mechanisms linking digital behaviours and youth mental health.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":17.5,"publicationDate":"2026-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149137764","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}