Social sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Combining radiocarbon dating with ethnohistory, the authors describe the timing and tempo of the spread of peaches in eastern North America after the fruit’s introduction. They show that peaches were cultivated and managed by Indigenous communities independently of influence from Spanish colonizers.

    • Jacob Holland-Lulewicz
    • , Victor Thompson
    •  & John Worth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How prioritization affects the format of visual working memory representations is currently not understood. Analyzing iEEG recordings in epilepsy patients, the authors demonstrate the critical role of recurrent computations and beta frequency oscillations during the selective attention to particular visual working memory content in the PFC.

    • Daniel Pacheco-Estefan
    • , Marie-Christin Fellner
    •  & Nikolai Axmacher

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Compressing global energy and industrial system decarbonization into less than three decades creates unique social, technical, financial and political risks. Here we introduce ‘off-ramps’ as one potential approach to manage these whilst still driving rapid emissions reductions.

    • Sam Uden
    •  & Chris Greig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Being born to a family with low-income has been related to lower socioeconomic status attainment in adulthood. Here, the authors report the effects of exposure to a family income transfer in an American Indian population on educational outcomes of the next generation of children.

    • Tim A. Bruckner
    • , Brenda Bustos
    •  & William E. Copeland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite high levels of trade, the basic characteristics of the aquatic food trade are largely unknown. Here, the authors present a global seafood trade database showing the increasing globalization of farmed and wild aquatic foods.

    • Jessica A. Gephart
    • , Rahul Agrawal Bejarano
    •  & Max Troell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rickman and colleagues explore scenarios for phasing out lending to fossil fuel firms. They analyse over $7 trillion of fossil fuel debt and show that financial regulation and international co-operation will be critical for a timely and just phase-out of fossil fuel finance.

    • J. Rickman
    • , M. Falkenberg
    •  & N. Ameli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dissecting the associations between exposure to environmental pollution and cancer risk remains crucial. Here, the authors evaluate the impact of air and water pollution on cancer incidence in China using a spatial evaluation system and show that most excess cancer cases occurred in areas with the highest level of co-pollution.

    • Jingmei Jiang
    • , Luwen Zhang
    •  & Chengyu Jiang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    With advances in generative AI, political speech deepfakes are becoming more realistic. Here, the authors show that people’s ability to distinguish between real and fake speeches relies on audio and visual information more than the speech content.

    • Matthew Groh
    • , Aruna Sankaranarayanan
    •  & Rosalind Picard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Since the signing of the Paris Agreement, power plants have emitted more CO2 in countries where more fossil fuel assets would be stranded under this treaty. In the United States, 16% of its electricity sector’s carbon budget could be spent within ten years due solely to the stranded asset effect.

    • Don Grant
    • , Tyler Hansen
    •  & Wesley Longhofer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the psychological factors related to the spread of conspiracy theories online is crucial. Here, the authors find that older age, self-rated political leaning, belief in false information, and confidence in spotting misinformation are factors associated with spreading conspiracy theories online.

    • Jonas R. Kunst
    • , Aleksander B. Gundersen
    •  & Mikolaj Morzy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anatomically modern humans dispersed through Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic. Here, the authors model this dispersal combining archaeological, paleoclimate, and palaeoecological data and investigating how these variables impacted human demographic processes.

    • Yaping Shao
    • , Christian Wegener
    •  & Gerd-Christian Weniger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The structure and dynamics of many social systems where human interactions involve communities can be described by higher-order networks. The authors propose a hypergraph-based model that describes how individuals form groups and navigate between groups of different sizes.

    • Iacopo Iacopini
    • , Márton Karsai
    •  & Alain Barrat

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors examine wisdom perception in convenience samples from twelve countries. They observe two latent dimensions that guide participant’s evaluation of wisdom-related characteristics in others and the self—reflective orientation and socio-emotional awareness, which were consistent across the studied cultural regions.

    • M. Rudnev
    • , H. C. Barrett
    •  & I. Grossmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study examines the impact of destructive wildfires on human migration in the contiguous United States, showing that only the most extreme events affected existing migration trends. Migration in response to wildfire building destruction was rare, while immobility was a more common response.

    • Kathryn McConnell
    • , Elizabeth Fussell
    •  & Kobie Price

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Bridge fires cause significant disruptions and economic losses in modern society, yet fire hazards are still often ignored or oversimplified in bridge design. This Perspective emphasizes the need for more holistic and comprehensive fire-safety design when retrofitting or designing new bridges.

    • Andrea Franchini
    • , Bosibori Barake
    •  & Jose L. Torero

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hickel and colleagues find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. They find Southern wages are 87-95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.

    • Jason Hickel
    • , Morena Hanbury Lemos
    •  & Felix Barbour

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Regulators’ approach to electric scooters on sidewalks is inconsistent and conflicting worldwide. Maintaining a minimum projected time-to-collision as a near-miss metric provides a sufficient condition for pedestrian safety as well as improving pedestrian subjective perceived safety.

    • Alireza Jafari
    •  & Yen-Chen Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors develop a methodology to quantify climate physical risks, both chronic and acute, on productive assets. Investor losses are underestimated up to 70% when neglecting asset level information, and up to 82% when neglecting tail acute risks.

    • Giacomo Bressan
    • , Anja Đuranović
    •  & Stefano Battiston

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study on fossil fuel subsidy reforms shows that the share of renewable energy and insulation of political processes from pro-subsidy interests can provide leverage points to break path-dependencies in fossil fuel-based economies.

    • Nils Droste
    • , Benjamin Chatterton
    •  & Jakob Skovgaard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Evolutionary multiplayer games in structured populations illustrate a variety of phenomena in natural and social systems. This research provides a mathematical framework to analyze multiplayer games with an arbitrary number of strategies on regular graphs.

    • Chaoqian Wang
    • , Matjaž Perc
    •  & Attila Szolnoki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Yu and colleagues leverage population-level data to construct a large-scale, geographically defined, inter-household social network. Using a multilevel network model, they show that having social ties in close geographic proximity is associated with stable household asset conditions, while geographically distant ties correlate to changes in asset allocation. Notably, they find that localised network interactions are associated with an increase in wealth inequality at the regional level, demonstrating how macro-level inequality may arise from micro-level social processes.

    • Shao-Tzu Yu
    • , Peng Wang
    •  & Brian Houle

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study introduces a method to quantify trade in digital products, like cloud computing and mobile games. It finds that this trade grows rapidly, may impact trade balances, support economic decoupling, and enhance economic complexity measures.

    • Viktor Stojkoski
    • , Philipp Koch
    •  & César A. Hidalgo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Discovering innovative ideas from numerous candidates is hard. Here, the authors show that simple autonomous agents (AI bots) can facilitate creative semantic discovery in human groups by leveraging the wisdom of crowds, essentially reducing noise.

    • Atsushi Ueshima
    • , Matthew I. Jones
    •  & Nicholas A. Christakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Through a matched case-control analysis this study reveals accident risk disparities between autonomous and human-driven vehicles. It suggests that accidents of vehicles equipped with Advanced Driving Systems generally have lower occurrence chance than human-driven ones in most scenarios.

    • Mohamed Abdel-Aty
    •  & Shengxuan Ding

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    New and dynamically changing opportunities for commercial/private and civilian spaceflight raise the need for an examination of how to ethically guide space industry and community. This Perspective explores such considerations with respect to space traveler selection and human subject research.

    • Allen Seylani
    • , Aman Singh Galsinh
    •  & Dana Tulodziecki

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Global climate policy has increasingly acknowledged the specific contributions of Indigenous Peoples. The outcome of COP 28, however, demonstrates that this acknowledgement has not shifted the conceptual foundations of dominant climate solutions, nor has it created space for Indigenous Peoples to effectively contribute. Drawing on our expertise as Indigenous scholars and practitioners, we offer four recommendations to shift climate policy and research away from these foundations towards reciprocal relationships with the natural world – strengthening it for future generations.

    • Graeme Reed
    • , Angele Alook
    •  & Deborah McGregor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Educational environment is known to influence learning efficiency of students, however qualitative analysis of this effect has open questions. The authors propose a model to quantify roommate peer effects based on student accommodation distribution and their academic performance.

    • Yi Cao
    • , Tao Zhou
    •  & Jian Gao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Zhao P.J. and his colleagues uncover spatial directionality of urban mobility by using new metrics of anisotropy and centripetality. They find monocentric cities have longer commutes with city expansion, while polycentric cities maintain consistent commuting patterns.

    • Pengjun Zhao
    • , Hao Wang
    •  & Jingzhong Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Archaeological and genetic evidence suggest differing scenarios for human migration out of Africa. Here, the authors present archaeological evidence of intense occupation in Wallacea from 44 thousand years ago, suggesting that this occupation obscured genetic evidence of earlier dispersals.

    • Ceri Shipton
    • , Mike W. Morley
    •  & Sue O’Connor

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    This Perspective provides insightful discussion in how engineers can aid human health and safety during earthquake disasters. From search and rescue, helping mobilize patients, and securing medical facilities and treatment engineering can work towards bettering earthquake response.

    • Luis Ceferino
    • , Yvonne Merino
    •  & Baturalp Ozturk

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Neolithic site of Dispilio, Northern Greece, is a pile-dwelling site with 900+ piles excavated. Here, the authors use the 5259 BC Miyake event to date the juniper tree-ring chronology constructed from these piles to 5140 BC, making it the first Neolithic site in the region to be absolutely calendar dated.

    • Andrej Maczkowski
    • , Charlotte Pearson
    •  & Albert Hafner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Contact patterns influence the spread of infectious diseases, but mathematical models of epidemics typically only account for age differences in contacts. Here, the authors investigate the importance of other sociodemographic characteristics in shaping contact patterns and vaccine uptake using survey data from Hungary.

    • Adriana Manna
    • , Júlia Koltai
    •  & Márton Karsai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visualising the structure of museum objects is a crucial step in understanding the origin, state, and composition of cultural heritage artifacts. Here the authors present an approach for creating computed tomography reconstructions using only standard 2D radiography equipment already available in most larger museums.

    • Francien G. Bossema
    • , Willem Jan Palenstijn
    •  & K. Joost Batenburg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Traders of financial options bet that firms’ stock prices will be affected by forecasts of seasonal climate produced by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Firms are exposed throughout the economy, and traders spend more to hedge the news from more skillful forecasts

    • Derek Lemoine
    •  & Sarah Kapnick

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A hindcast experiment of the 2021 summer flood in West Germany unveils a 17-hour lead time for preparedness and advisable action, holding promise for impact-based forecasting of inundated roads, railways and building footprint in real-time.

    • Husain Najafi
    • , Pallav Kumar Shrestha
    •  & Luis Samaniego

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