EurekAlert! News by Subject: Social & Behavior

Social & Behavior

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 13-Jun-2026 17:15 ET (13-Jun-2026 21:15 GMT/UTC)

20-May-2026

Carbon unlocking of transportation infrastructure: assessment and regional disparities across 30 provinces in China

HEP Data Cooperation Journals
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Based on panel data from 2004 to 2023 covering 30 provinces in China, this study establishes a three-dimensional (economic, technological, institutional) indicator system to evaluate the carbon unlocking level of transportation infrastructure. The entropy weight method and natural breaks method are applied to classify regional and provincial levels, revealing a clear gradient gap and provincial differentiation, which supports low-carbon transition in the transport sector.

Journal: JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING STUDIES

20-May-2026

Rainforest foragers intensified plant use long before agriculture

Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
Peer-Reviewed Publication

New research identifies pre-agricultural intensification of plant use in Pleistocene Sri Lankan rainforests

Journal: Nature Ecology & Evolution

20-May-2026

Digital platform significantly reduces distress among children of divorce

University of Copenhagen
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A digital solution developed by researchers at the University of Copenhagen improves the mental health of children and young people after their parents’ divorce, according to a new study. The platform also reduces family conflict, and several Danish municipalities have already adopted it.

Journal: npj Digital Medicine

20-May-2026

Fast-food waste driven by wrong orders: study

RMIT University
Reports and Proceedings

A review into food waste in Australia’s quick service restaurants has found order mistakes are the biggest driver of food waste, with better staff training a key part of the solution.

Funder: New South Wales Environmental Protection Authority, Queensland Government

20-May-2026

New studies point to stronger support for working parents as key to child development

National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
Reports and Proceedings

Presented at the Population Association of Singapore (PAS) 2026 Annual Conference, new Singapore studies explore how modern family life, from infant childcare and paternity leave to children’s growing use of AI, is reshaping parenting and child development. The findings will also inform a joint NUS Medicine–PAS white paper on fertility and human development.

19-May-2026

AI can seem more human than real humans in a classic Turing test, study finds

University of California - San Diego
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new University of California San Diego study unveils the first empirical evidence that a modern artificial intelligence system can pass the Turing test — a major scientific benchmark that asks whether a machine can imitate human conversation so convincingly that people can’t reliably tell it apart from a real person. In a series of experiments, people were often unable to tell the difference between humans and advanced large language models (LLMs).

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

19-May-2026

Artificial intelligence struggles to understand the Mainz dialect

Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
Reports and Proceedings

How well do language models understand Meenzerisch, the dialect spoken in the German city of Mainz? A research team has investigated this question for the first time. The study's findings, recently presented at the 2026 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), show that current artificial intelligence (AI) models have great difficulty understanding the dialect correctly.