Volume 9 Issue 10, October 2025

An academic website serves as both a public-facing window on the world wide web and an important internal laboratory resource. In this ‘How to’ piece, I outline how to build your academic website, including what content to include, and ways to build and launch your site.

Despite its prominence in public discourse, economic growth does not translate into lasting improvements in well-being. To improve people’s lives, policymakers should shift their focus from economic growth to well-being. We provide example policies that could foster thriving, sustainable and inclusive societies.

Can loneliness be reduced by changing perceptions of empathy? A large-scale study by Pei et al. shows that people tend to underestimate others’ empathy, and correcting this misconception fosters social connection and increases the formation of friendships.

In a cross-national behavioural experiment, we examined how providing information about negative externalities and making decisions observable influence prosocial behaviour. Across countries, we found that knowledge of negative externalities (as compared with opportunities for ignorance) robustly increased prosociality, and that guilt-prone individuals were more responsive to information about these negative consequences of their actions.

This network meta-analysis of 152 randomized controlled trials found that personalized and group-customized digital smoking-cessation interventions — particularly text messages and app-based tools — significantly improved cessation outcomes, as compared with standard care. These interventions demonstrated greatest efficacy in middle-aged adults and short-to-medium-term programmes. The work provides a foundation for future digital smoking-cessation frameworks.

Individuality in social behaviour is of interest across several academic fields, yet there are many barriers to interdisciplinary efforts. In this Perspective, Kuper et al propose an integrative, interdisciplinary approach, and detail their recommendations for researchers interested in this topic.

Ojer et al. use data from the American National Election Studies to map US voters in a two-dimensional ideological space. Democrats and Republicans have grown more polarized over the past 30 years, while partisan sorting has declined since 2010.

Cruz and Lombrozo examine how laypeople make sense of scientific explanations and find that although jargon reduces understanding, for short explanations, jargon makes the explanation more satisfying.

A network meta-analysis of 152 randomized controlled trials finds that personalized and group-customized digital interventions, especially SMS and app-based tools, improve smoking cessation versus standard care, with greater benefits among middle-aged adults in short- to medium-term programmes.

Yamashita et al. explore how conversational content is represented in the brain, revealing shared and distinct brain activity patterns for speech production and comprehension, with contrasting timescale properties between the two processes.

Using in silico neuroscience, Gifford et al. developed a neural control algorithm to modulate the representational relationships between visual cortical areas, revealing how these areas jointly represent the world as an interconnected network.

Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe.

Zhu et al. use machine learning to reveal complex insights into human strategic decision-making.

Young adults face rising loneliness and mental health challenges. In a study of 5,192 undergraduates, Pei et al. find that perceiving peers as empathic is related to better well-being. Students, however, underestimate peers’ empathy. Two field experiments offered simple interventions that reduced this empathy perception gap and increased social behaviour and connection.

This systematic review and meta-analysis finds that less than a quarter of crimes are committed in groups, yet half of all offenders co-offend at least once in their careers. Co-offending is more common in property crimes and among young offenders, with most co-offences involving two people.

Fan et al. find that income-preserving 4-day workweeks boost job satisfaction and mental and physical health, while easing burnout. Gains are partly driven by improvements in work ability, reduced fatigue and fewer sleep problems.

People use knowledge of social network structure—that is, popularity and distance—to strategically spread gossip. To achieve this, they draw on internal models that capture the cascading dynamics of information flow across ties in a network.

This research advances a mechanistic reward learning account of social learning strategies. Through experiments and simulations, it shows how individuals learn to learn from others, dynamically shaping the processes involved in cultural evolution.

This Registered Report of 7,978 people in 20 countries found that guilt and information about consequences drive prosocial behaviour. Guilt-prone individuals gave more when they were informed about the consequences.