Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search.

If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues such as rising political polarization. This concern is central to the 'echo chamber' and 'filter bubble' debates, which critique the roles that user choice and algorithmic curation play in guiding users to different online information sources. These roles can be measured as exposure, defined as the URLs shown to users by online platforms, and engagement, defined as the URLs selected by users.

Monitoring event-driven dynamics on Twitter: a case study in Belarus.

Unlabelled: Analysts of social media differ in their emphasis on the effects of message content versus social network structure. The balance of these factors may change substantially across time. When a major event occurs, initial independent reactions may give way to more social diffusion of interpretations of the event among different communities, including those committed to disinformation.

Inequality between identity groups and social unrest.

Economic, social and political inequality between different identity groups is an important contributor to violent conflicts within societies. To deepen our understanding of the underlying social dynamics, we develop a mathematical model describing cooperation and conflict in a society composed of multiple factions engaged in economic and political interactions. Our model predicts that growing economic and political inequality tends to lead to the collapse of cooperation between factions that were initially seeking to cooperate.

Cultural values predict national COVID-19 death rates.

Unlabelled: National responses to a pandemic require populations to comply through personal behaviors that occur in a cultural context. Here we show that aggregated cultural values of nations, derived from World Values Survey data, have been at least as important as top-down government actions in predicting the impact of COVID-19. At the population level, the cultural factor of cosmopolitanism, together with obesity, predict higher numbers of deaths in the first two months of COVID-19 on the scale of nations.

Evolution of initiation rites during the Austronesian dispersal.

As adaptive systems, kinship and its accompanying rules have co-evolved with elements of complex societies, including wealth inheritance, subsistence, and power relations. Here we consider an aspect of kinship evolution in the Austronesian dispersal that began from about 5500 BP in Taiwan, reaching Melanesia about 3200 BP, and dispersing into Micronesia by 1500 BP. Previous, foundational work has used phylogenetic comparative methods and ethnolinguistic information to infer matrilocal residence in proto-Austronesian societies.

Early warning of vulnerable counties in a pandemic using socio-economic variables.

In the U.S. in early 2020, heterogenous and incomplete county-scale data on COVID-19 hindered effective interventions in the pandemic.

Cultural prerequisites of socioeconomic development.

In the centuries since the enlightenment, the world has seen an increase in socioeconomic development, measured as increased life expectancy, education, economic development and democracy. While the co-occurrence of these features among nations is well documented, little is known about their origins or co-evolution. Here, we compare this growth of prosperity in nations to the historical record of cultural values in the twentieth century, derived from global survey data.

The cultural foundations of modern democracies.

National democracy is a rare thing in human history and its stability has long been tied to the cultural values of citizens. Yet it has not been established whether changing cultural values made modern democracy possible or whether those values were a response to democratic institutions. Here we combine longitudinal data and cohort information of nearly 500,000 individuals from 109 nations to track the co-evolution of democratic values and institutions over the last century.

U.S. obesity as delayed effect of excess sugar.

In the last century, U.S. diets were transformed, including the addition of sugars to industrially-processed foods.

Religious change preceded economic change in the 20th century.

The decline in the everyday importance of religion with economic development is a well-known correlation, but which phenomenon comes first? Using unsupervised factor analysis and a birth cohort approach to create a retrospective time series, we present 100-year time series of secularization in different nations, derived from recent global values surveys, which we compare by decade to historical gross domestic product figures in those nations. We find evidence that a rise in secularization generally has preceded economic growth over the past century. Our multilevel, time-lagged regressions also indicate that tolerance for individual rights predicted 20th century economic growth even better than secularization.