{"title":"Cultural tendencies in generative AI","authors":"Jackson G. Lu, Lesley Luyang Song, Lu Doris Zhang","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02242-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02242-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We show that generative artificial intelligence (AI) models—trained on textual data that are inherently cultural—exhibit cultural tendencies when used in different human languages. Here we focus on two foundational constructs in cultural psychology: social orientation and cognitive style. First, we analyse GPT’s responses to a large set of measures in both Chinese and English. When used in Chinese (versus English), GPT exhibits a more interdependent (versus independent) social orientation and a more holistic (versus analytic) cognitive style. Second, we replicate these cultural tendencies in ERNIE, a popular generative AI model in China. Third, we demonstrate the real-world impact of these cultural tendencies. For example, when used in Chinese (versus English), GPT is more likely to recommend advertisements with an interdependent (versus independent) social orientation. Fourth, exploratory analyses suggest that cultural prompts (for example, prompting generative AI to assume the role of a Chinese person) can adjust these cultural tendencies.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144328619","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":"Majorities genuinely support global redistributive and climate policies worldwide","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02178-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02178-6","url":null,"abstract":"Surveys in 20 countries reveal strong public support for global policies such as a tax on millionaires to finance low-income countries or a carbon price to finance a global basic income. Survey experiments in Western countries confirm that support is sincere and that citizens prefer political platforms that include global redistribution policies.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144319495","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":"Mental health-related genes that are sensitive to the environment","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02201-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02201-w","url":null,"abstract":"Genome-wide association studies of monozygotic twins revealed genes associated with psychiatric and neurodevelopmental traits that are environmentally sensitive, which means their function might depend on environmental factors such as stress.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"145 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144319577","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}
Amy M. Way, Philip J. Piper, Rebecca Chalker, Dominic Wilkins, Erin Wilkins, Leanne Watson Redpath, Paul Glass, Marilyn Rose Carroll, Emily Nutman, Nina Kononenko, Michael Spate, Timothy T. Barrows, Duncan Wright, Wayne Brennan
{"title":"The earliest evidence of high-elevation ice age occupation in Australia","authors":"Amy M. Way, Philip J. Piper, Rebecca Chalker, Dominic Wilkins, Erin Wilkins, Leanne Watson Redpath, Paul Glass, Marilyn Rose Carroll, Emily Nutman, Nina Kononenko, Michael Spate, Timothy T. Barrows, Duncan Wright, Wayne Brennan","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02180-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02180-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Australia’s Eastern Highlands have traditionally been viewed as a cold-climate barrier to Late Pleistocene (~35,000–11,700 years ago) mobility, with older evidence restricted to elevations below the periglacial zone. However, this model has not been adequately tested with regionally specific, high-resolution archaeological data. Here we report excavation results from a high-altitude (1,073 m) cave, Dargan Shelter, in the upper Blue Mountains, which indicate that occupation first occurred ~20,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum, making this the highest elevation Pleistocene site identified in Australia so far. Findings include multiple in situ hearths and 693 stone artefacts, several of which were sourced from sites along the mountain range, providing evidence for previously undetected interactions to the north and south and the repeated use of this cold-climate landscape during the Late Pleistocene. Our results align the Australian continent with global sequences, which indicate that cold climates were not necessarily natural barriers to human mobility and occupation.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"230 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144296144","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}
Eric Feltham, Laura Forastiere, Nicholas A. Christakis
{"title":"Cognitive representations of social networks in isolated villages","authors":"Eric Feltham, Laura Forastiere, Nicholas A. Christakis","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02221-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02221-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them. We develop a sampling strategy to evaluate network cognition in 10,072 adults across 82 Honduras villages and systematically map the underlying village networks. In 17 villages, we also discern the genetic relatedness of all 1,333 residents. Observers overestimate the social interactions among kin and are 33.38 percentage points (<i>J</i>) more accurate in judgements of ties between non-kin (95% confidence interval: 31.27–35.49). Counterintuitively, observers had more accurate beliefs about non-kin pairs, especially when the observers were popular, middle-aged, or educated. Observers were less able to accurately judge ties across different religions or wealth. Individuals in villages that cultivate coffee, requiring coordinated effort, demonstrated greater bias to view networks as connected. Finally, more accurate respondents had better access to information that we experimentally introduced to their peers. Overall, people inflate the number of connections in their networks and exhibit varying accuracy and bias, with implications for how people affect and are affected by the social world.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144296196","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":"Advocating for a community-centred model for responding to potential information harms","authors":"Claire Wardle, David Scales","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02233-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02233-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Various characteristics of contemporary information ecosystems, including types of dangerous speech (hate speech and misinformation), affordances such as algorithmic targeting and structural barriers such as paywalls, are potentially causing harms to different communities. The current focus by practitioners on ‘social listening’ as the primary mechanism for detecting these harms is flawed, and we argue that mechanisms that effectively integrate and contextualize both offline and online data streams are required. We therefore outline a blueprint for a new model, the Community-Centered Exploration, Engagement, and Evaluation system. It draws on lessons learned from integrated epidemiological surveillance systems that merge multiple data streams. Such an approach can help detect and mitigate potential information harms, integrating community participation and response at its core. This community-driven model is designed to counteract the growing public distrust across a range of issues including public health, election integrity and climate.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"126 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144296143","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":"How laypeople evaluate scientific explanations containing jargon","authors":"Francisco Cruz, Tania Lombrozo","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02227-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02227-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Individuals rely on others’ expertise to achieve a basic understanding of the world. But how can non-experts achieve understanding from explanations that, by definition, they are ill-equipped to assess? Across 9 experiments with 6,698 participants (Study 1A = 737; 1B = 734; 1C = 733; 2A = 1,014; 2B = 509; 2C = 1,012; 3A = 1,026; 3B = 512; 4 = 421), we address this puzzle by focusing on scientific explanations with jargon. We identify ‘when’ and ‘why’ the inclusion of jargon makes explanations more satisfying, despite decreasing their comprehensibility. We find that jargon increases satisfaction because laypeople assume the jargon fills gaps in explanations that are otherwise incomplete. We also identify strategies for debiasing these judgements: when people attempt to generate their own explanations, inflated judgements of poor explanations with jargon are reduced, and people become better calibrated in their assessments of their own ability to explain.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144268607","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":"Conversational content is organized across multiple timescales in the brain","authors":"Masahiro Yamashita, Rieko Kubo, Shinji Nishimoto","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02231-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02231-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The evolution of conversation facilitates the exchange of intricate thoughts and emotions. The meaning is progressively constructed by integrating both produced and perceived speech into hierarchical linguistic structures across multiple timescales, including words, sentences and discourse. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these interactive sense-making processes remain largely unknown. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity during hours of spontaneous conversations, modelling neural representations of conversational content using contextual embeddings derived from a large language model (GPT) at varying timescales. Our results reveal that linguistic representations are both shared and distinct between production and comprehension, distributed across various functional networks. Shared representations, predominantly localized within language-selective regions, were consistently observed at shorter timescales, corresponding to words and single sentences. By contrast, modality-specific representations exhibited opposing timescale selectivity: shorter for production and longer for comprehension, suggesting that distinct mechanisms are involved in contextual integration. These findings suggest that conversational meaning emerges from the interplay between shared linguistic codes and modality-specific temporal integration, facilitating context-dependent comprehension and adaptive speech production.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144260246","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}
Mahdi Ramadan, Cheng Tang, Nicholas Watters, Mehrdad Jazayeri
{"title":"Computational basis of hierarchical and counterfactual information processing","authors":"Mahdi Ramadan, Cheng Tang, Nicholas Watters, Mehrdad Jazayeri","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02232-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02232-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Humans solve complex multistage decision problems using hierarchical and counterfactual strategies. Here we designed a task that reliably engages these strategies and conducted hypothesis-driven experiments to identify the computational constraints that give rise to them. We found three key constraints: a bottleneck in parallel processing that promotes hierarchical analysis, a compensatory but capacity-limited counterfactual process, and working memory noise that reduces counterfactual fidelity. To test whether these strategies are computationally rational—that is, optimal given such constraints—we trained recurrent neural networks under systematically varied limitations. Only recurrent neural networks subjected to all three constraints reproduced human-like behaviour. Further analysis revealed that hierarchical, counterfactual and postdictive strategies—typically viewed as distinct—lie along a continuum of rational adaptations. These findings suggest that human decision strategies may emerge from a shared set of computational limitations, offering a unifying framework for understanding the flexibility and efficiency of human cognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144260247","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":"Online quiz game builds bridges between members of opposite parties","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41562-025-02226-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02226-1","url":null,"abstract":"A cooperative online quiz game called Tango reduced partisan animosity, improved democracy-related attitudes and was rated as highly enjoyable by participants. The effects of the quiz game were durable and persisted up to four months, and they were similar for Republican and Democrat players.","PeriodicalId":19074,"journal":{"name":"Nature Human Behaviour","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":29.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144260245","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}