Morality and political economy from the vantage point of economics.

Political disagreement is increasingly moral, rather than economic, in nature, raising the question how the fields of political economy and moral psychology relate to each other. While these disciplines were initially deeply intertwined, cross-disciplinary exchange became rare throughout the 20th century. More recently, the tide has shifted again-social scientists of different backgrounds recognized that morality and politico-economic outcomes influence each other in rich bidirectional ways.

Market exposure and human morality.

According to evolutionary theories, markets may foster an internalized and universalist prosociality because it supports market-based cooperation. This paper uses the cultural folklore of 943 pre-industrial ethnolinguistic groups to show that a society's degree of market interactions, proxied by the presence of intercommunity trade and money, is associated with the cultural salience of (1) prosocial behaviour, (2) interpersonal trust, (3) universalist moral values and (4) moral emotions of guilt, shame and anger. To provide tentative evidence that a part of this correlation reflects a causal effect of market interactions, the analysis leverages both fine-grained geographic variation across neighbouring historical societies and plausibly exogenous variation in the presence of markets that arises through proximity to historical trade routes or the local degree of ecological diversity.

Confidence and central tendency in perceptual judgment.

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the stimulus distribution. Based on a formal Bayesian framework, we generate predictions about the relationships between subjective confidence, central tendency, and response variability. Specifically, our model clarifies that lower subjective confidence as a measure of posterior uncertainty about a judgment should predict (i) a lower sensitivity of magnitude estimates to objective stimuli; (ii) a higher sensitivity to the mean of the stimulus distribution; (iii) a stronger central tendency effect at higher stimulus magnitudes; and (iv) higher response variability.

Initial results from the New Horizons exploration of 2014 MU, a small Kuiper Belt object.

The Kuiper Belt is a distant region of the outer Solar System. On 1 January 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew close to (486958) 2014 MU, a cold classical Kuiper Belt object approximately 30 kilometers in diameter. Such objects have never been substantially heated by the Sun and are therefore well preserved since their formation.

Genome-Wide Association Mapping Reveals That Specific and Pleiotropic Regulatory Mechanisms Fine-Tune Central Metabolism and Growth in Arabidopsis.

Central metabolism is a coordinated network that is regulated at multiple levels by resource availability and by environmental and developmental cues. Its genetic architecture has been investigated by mapping metabolite quantitative trait loci (QTL). A more direct approach is to identify enzyme activity QTL, which distinguishes between QTL in structural genes encoding enzymes and regulatory QTL.