Continuing the network science installment, this group of articles reveals some of the more nefarious considerations, and even applications, of the scientific method in the employ of manipulating human activity at a large scale.
Sharper brains switch to a 'not what you know, but who you know' mindset online and on social media, study shows
May 2026, phys.org
It's pretty fascinating - The irony of how social media platforms literally need you to be less social in order to engage with more content, almost like it's content vs people - almost like it's financial capital vs social capital, and we are being influenced to give up the social capital for sure. The more of your social capital I can take from you, the less you will be able to avoid my taking your financial capital. It's how I drink your milkshake, as they say.
It seems the problem is that in the end, we the users of social media applications somehow end up with less of both.
"When you follow someone on LinkedIn, join a Facebook group, or become a member of an online community, you might assume you will learn more about the content they share. Paradoxically, our study suggests the opposite happens, as individuals channel their mental energy away from knowledge gathering to mapping the social landscape, noting people's individual connections and the wider network."Interestingly, this shift was exhibited more among people with greater working memory capacity, so the sharper you are cognitively the more likely you are to tune that content out."The research involved around 1,000 adults aged between 18 and 77 across five experiments. In each study, participants engaged with simulated social media environments, such as joining groups, following pages, or becoming friends with others. Their exposure to content, as well as their memory for both content ("who knows what") and social connections ("who knows who"), was then assessed."This pattern reflects a cognitive trade-off. Rather than encoding information itself, individuals increasingly track who possesses the information. It indicates that people engage with and use the social network like an external hard drive for the brain.""The strength of this switch also appears to be determined by working memory capacity. Individuals with higher working memory capacity showed a more than 50% reduction in content recall, but a dramatic increase (over 150%) in accuracy in tracking social connections after forming connections to others.
University of Bristol, University at Buffalo, State University of New York: Esther Kang et al, Tracking connections, not content: How working memory shapes content and social learning in online networks, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2026.104925
Image credit: Slime mold Arcyria major releasing spores by Henri Koskinen - Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition - 2025
The 'private solution trap': Why richer countries may favor adaptation over public solutions, and who pays
Mar 2026, phys.org
The Private Solution Trap - Participants given higher budgets (representing wealthier nations) consistently contributed more to private solutions (like flood mitigation) than those given lower budgets, while they also contributed proportionally less to public solutions (reducing greenhouse gases). Inequality within groups therefore dramatically increased over the course of the game."The data clearly shows this is a problem that exists above culture."
via University of Nottingham: Eugene Malthouse et al, The private solution trap in collective action problems across 34 nations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2504632123
Scientists call out health-harming corporations driving rise in chronic disease
Mar 2026, phys.org
This is straight memetics, and how ideas spread, or don't spread, and how to modulate that spread:
Globally, five commercial products are key factors in 31% of all deaths each year:8m - Fossil fuels7m - Tobacco2m - Ultra-processed foods2m - Chemicals used in commerce and pesticides2m - Alcohol"Clinicians, the public, the media and policymakers need to understand that these health-harming industries all apply the same set of tactics used by 'Big Tobacco' to create uncertainty about the harms of their products, delay regulation and therefore continue to profit from their sale"
via University of Sydney and the Center to End Corporate Harm at UC San Francisco: Corporations as Vectors of Noncommunicable Disease—Using Internal Industry Documents to Identify Preventive Strategies, New England Journal of Medicine (2026). DOI: 10.1056/NEJMms2507028
Can you trust a finding? A new project maps which studies replicate
Mar 2026, phys.org
News about the news: Findings from the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program - a collaborative effort involving 865 researchers - have been published in Nature as a collection of three papers alongside a release of five additional preprints. The SCORE program offers new empirical evidence on the reproducibility, robustness, and replicability of research across the social and behavioral sciences, and the predictability of replicability.The SCORE team sampled claims from 3,900 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning criminology, economics, education, finance, health, management, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, political science, public administration, and sociology. These claims were subjected to a variety of methods of credibility assessment.
[This writeup also reports findings from 5 more articles that are still pre-prints]
Transparency - Data was available for only 24% of a sample of 600 assessed papers. For the 143 papers that were subjected to reproduction tests, 74% successfully reproduced at least approximately and 54% precisely. Reproducibility was highest for papers where both original data and code were shared, and lowest when reanalysis required reconstructing the original dataset from public sources.Uncertainty - For each of 100 papers, at least five independent analysts tested the same question with the same data, applying their own decisions about how to best analyze the data. ... 74% of analyses were reported to arrive at the same conclusion as in the original investigation; 24% to no effects/inconclusive result, and 2% to the opposite effect as in the original investigation.More - Human assessments are reasonably accurate at predicting replication outcomes, but of the automated methods of eliciting predictions from machines about the replicability of findings (Synthetic Markets, MACROSCORE, and A+), none were consistently effective.General Findings - For reproducibility specifically, there were substantial differences in data availability that were associated with higher reproducibility rates in Economics and Political Science compared with other fields.
led by Pennsylvania State University, TwoSix Technologies, and the University of Southern California: Visit the website for an overview of the SCORE program, via Nature. https://www.cos.io/score
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