Nature Human Behaviour

Vandoros, Sotiris; P Barros, Pedro; Skordis, Jolene; Burchell, Brendan; Fontinha, Rita; Gomes, Pedro

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02262-xpmid: 40695987

Gribble, Paul L.

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02310-6pmid: 40987846

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.

Sarracino, Francesco; J. O’Connor, Kelsey

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02277-4pmid: 40670698

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.

Shamay-Tsoory, Simone

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02291-6pmid: 41102497

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.

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02287-2pmid: 40804175

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.

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02296-1pmid: 40913131

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.

Kuper, Niclas; Breitmoser, Yves; Caspers, Barbara; Dammhahn, Melanie; Gadau, Jürgen; Kaiser, Marie I.; Kandler, Christian; Kroh, Martin; Krüger, Oliver; Kurtz, Joachim; Lemola, Sakari; Rauthmann, John F.; Richter, S. Helene; Voelcker-Rehage, Claudia; Back, Mitja D.

Ojer, Jaume; Cárcamo, David; Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo; Starnini, Michele

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02251-0pmid: 40603579

Has ideological polarization actually increased in the past decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? Here we present a methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological polarization by embedding the respondents to a wide variety of political, social and economic topics from the American National Election Studies into a two-dimensional ideological space. By identifying several demographic attributes of the American National Election Studies respondents, we chart how political and socioeconomic groups move through the ideological space in time. We observe that income and especially racial groups align into parties, but their ideological distance has not increased over time. Instead, Democrats and Republicans have become ideologically more distant in the past 30 years: Both parties moved away from the centre, at different rates. Furthermore, Democratic voters have become ideologically more heterogeneous after 2010, indicating that partisan sorting has declined in the past decade.

Cruz, Francisco; Lombrozo, Tania

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02227-0pmid: 40506550

Individuals rely on others’ expertise to achieve a basic understanding of the world. But how can non-experts achieve understanding from explanations that, by definition, they are ill-equipped to assess? Across 9 experiments with 6,698 participants (Study 1A = 737; 1B = 734; 1C = 733; 2A = 1,014; 2B = 509; 2C = 1,012; 3A = 1,026; 3B = 512; 4 = 421), we address this puzzle by focusing on scientific explanations with jargon. We identify ‘when’ and ‘why’ the inclusion of jargon makes explanations more satisfying, despite decreasing their comprehensibility. We find that jargon increases satisfaction because laypeople assume the jargon fills gaps in explanations that are otherwise incomplete. We also identify strategies for debiasing these judgements: when people attempt to generate their own explanations, inflated judgements of poor explanations with jargon are reduced, and people become better calibrated in their assessments of their own ability to explain.

Li, Shen; Li, Yiyang; Xu, Chenhao; Tao, Siheng; Sun, Haozhen; Yang, Jiaqing; Wang, Yilin; Li, Sheyu; Ma, Xuelei

doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02295-2pmid: 40897803

Smoking cessation is the only evidence-based approach to reducing tobacco-related health risks, yet traditional interventions suffer from limited coverage. Although digital interventions show promise, their comparative efficacy across methodological frameworks and technology types remains unclear. Here we assessed digital interventions versus standard care via frequentist random-effects network meta-analysis of 152 randomized controlled trials (48.8% USA, 7.5% China). Interventions were categorized by methodology and technology type, with cross-matched subgroup analyses. Results showed that personalized interventions significantly improved smoking cessation rates compared with standard care (relative risk (RR) 1.86, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.54–2.24), while group-customized interventions were more effective (RR 1.93, 95% CI 1.30–2.86) compared with standard digital interventions (RR 1.50, 95% CI 1.31–1.72). Among the various technology types, text message-based interventions were the most effective (RR 1.63, 95% CI 1.38–1.92). Intervention effectiveness was also influenced by age, with middle-aged individuals benefitting more than younger individuals. Short- and medium-term interventions were more effective than long-term interventions. Sensitivity analyses further confirmed these low-to-moderate findings. However, this study has some limitations, including methodological heterogeneity, potential bias and inconsistent definitions of numerical interventions. In addition, long-term follow-up data remain limited. Future studies require large-scale trials to assess long-term sustainability and population-specific responses, as well as standardization of methods and integration of data at the individual level.