From a young age most people are told to be rational: weigh costs and benefits, pick the option that pays off best. But a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Marta C. Couto, Fernando P. Santos (Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems group at the University of Amsterdam), and Christian Hilbe at the Interdisciplinary Transformation University in Linz suggests that in social situations, people who are a bit less precise – a bit more ‘noisy’ – can sometimes come out ahead.

Bans on teenagers’ social media use are gathering pace worldwide. Their proponents claim that social media bans will improve young people’s mental health, but what evidence supports these claims? In their new Frontiers in Developmental Psychology article, Dr Monika Neff Lind and her co-authors argue that there is no solid scientific evidence behind these bans, and reason to believe they could backfire. In this guest editorial, Neff Lind explains why she and her colleagues doubt that social media bans will work, and how bans should be evaluated to determine whether they have any positive effects.

Officials in Oakland sharply increased the number of homeless encampments they cleared in the months after the 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision made it easier for municipalities nationwide to do so, new research from UC Berkeley shows. Many sites have been closed repeatedly, the analysis found — one was swept 18 times in a four-year period. More recently, efforts to close camps have shifted into census tracts that have higher poverty rates and larger shares of Hispanic residents. 

People living in deprived neighbourhoods have a significantly higher risk of premature ‘deaths of despair,' according to an international study that uses data entirely from New Zealand.

Samuel Kruger, associate professor of finance; John Griffin, James A. Elkins Centennial Chair in Finance; and doctoral student Prateek Mahajan found that fraud in government-funded pandemic loans explained 22.5% of the average increase in housing prices during 2020 and 2021.