The Chinese government is phasing in reforms for many technical standards that shape the products and services used by consumers around the world. New research published in Contemporary Economic Policy examined the impact of these reforms on corporate labor employment.

A new psychological therapy designed by a team of UCL-led researchers has been found to reduce rates of violence and aggression among male offenders with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).

Urban versus rural. Penn State versus Michigan. Star Wars versus Star Trek. As social beings, humans gravitate toward groups. But sometimes group living can spur an “us versus them” mentality that causes conflict, especially when two groups are competing for the same limited resources, like money or a championship trophy. Anne Pisor, assistant professor of anthropology at Penn State and Social Science Research Institute co-funded faculty member, discusses her recently published paper on the “us versus them” mindset as well as the causes and how to overcome it.

In some bargaining situations, decision-makers may have private plans for every contingency. But when decisions are made on the spot, bargainers betray some of their private information, and this can influence the outcome of the deal. An analysis of bargaining exchanges on eBay shows that when a response to a buyer’s first offer wasn’t quick, the more likely a seller was to accept the buyer’s second offer. Slow responses reveal that the seller actually finds an offer attractive; therefore, the buyer should follow up with another offer if they want to seal the deal.

Gilbert Gimm, Associate Professor, Health Administration and Policy, College of Public Health, and Debora Goetz Goldberg, Associate Professor, Health Administration and Policy, College of Public Health; Affiliate Faculty, Psychology, College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), received funding for: “Disease Intervention Specialist Certification Program: Financing Models and Workforce Analysis to Enhance Public Health.”

Allison Redlich, Distinguished University Professor, Criminology, Law and Society, College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), received funding for the project: “Schoolhouse interrogations and confessions: Perspectives from principals and students.”

With the popularity of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Llama on the rise, the question is often asked whether or not these programs can accurately match the style of text written by humans. A team of Carnegie Mellon University researchers set out to answer this question, and their findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In this study, researchers were able to show how LLMs write by prompting them with extracts of writing from various genres, such as TV scripts and academic articles. The research team found large differences in grammatical, lexical and stylistic features between text written by LLMs and humans. These differences were largest for instruction-tuned models, such as ChatGPT, which undergo additional training to answer questions and follow instructions.