Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 26 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02540-2Harootonian et al. find that people switch between effortful, tailored teaching and easier, simple shortcuts, favouring shortcuts even when unhelpful. Prompting participants to reflect on learners’ limitations restores effective, personalized instruction.

Humans adapt learning rates on both a fast and a slow time scale, and the central orbitofrontal cortex may represent the slow time scale.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

With the far-right Alternative for Germany leading in polls for national and state elections, institutions are facing up to proposed restrictions on academic freedom.

Some of the world's most influential researchers in analytical sociology, network science, and computational social science will visit Linköping University this autumn as part of a new international l...

Large language models offer new opportunities for behavioural science, but their rapid evolution poses challenges for research rigour. We introduce a consensus-based reporting checklist to improve tra...

Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led.

The Cultural Ecology of Social Media

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...

Nature Human Behaviour - Impaired social functioning is a core feature of autism spectrum disorders. This systematic review and meta-analysis synthesizes the evidence for this across studies...

Abstract. The capacity to represent the mental states of other individuals, known as ‘mindreading’ or ‘theory of mind’, is key to successful social predict

Weekly videos about the craft of science. A Human Nature Lab science outreach effort. Later in 2026, we will be expanding to include voices from other labs around the world.

Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) is a leading international centre in sustainability science at Stockholm University. The Centre advances scientific understanding of the dynamic interactions between

From equations to fitted models in minutes: what LLMs are changing in computational cognitive science and how we should adapt.

The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...

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