More information today is becoming more accessible to more people at an ever-growing rate. How does epistemic curiosity operate in this expanding informational landscape? We test a novel theory which postulates that experienced curiosity is a function of two psychological factors: Interest, which is cognitive, “cool” and relatively stable in time, and Urge that is “hot” and quick to rise and decay. These factors determine one's experienced curiosity at any given point in time. Interestingly, these temporal dynamics may lead to time-dependent changes in epistemic choices. In a series of forced-choice experiments (n = 702), participants chose between receiving answers to either high-Urge or high-Interest questions. Consistent with predictions derived from our theory, we found a present-bias in preference for Urge. Our theory explains why, in stark contrast to individual interest and with the potential to derail public discourse, a competition for our attention inherently incentivizes the use of inciting and sensational information. We present and test a theory-based behavioral nudge that partially ameliorates these effects.

An especially critical task is to raise awareness of the effects of war on children, in general, and with reference to specific children whose circumstances might enhance their vulnerability. Starting points, from which we begin our discussion, are the abduction and separation of 3-year-old identical twins during the Hamas attacks on the South of Israel, on October 7, 2023. Emphasis is given to these twins’ circumstances and to all children’s heightened vulnerability to the detrimental effects of war-related trauma, including mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Specific attention is given to the profound bond between identical twins and the devastating consequences of separation on their immediate and long-term emotional well-being. Drawing on research findings surrounding children at war and on historical evidence for the effects of twin separation on individuals exposed to war, our commentary underscores the urgent need for awareness and condemnation of the direct targeting of children. We advocate the preservation of family ties as essential for fostering children’s resilience and emotional support. We also call upon professional organizations and the international community to prioritize the reunification of children with their families as a moral imperative in safeguarding the well-being and future of innocent children exposed to terrorism and conflict in war-torn regions.

In this Article, we offer a new design for our patent system with a view

to optimize its functioning. As multiple patent scholars have recognized, the

root cause of the ills of our patent system is the high rate of low-quality

patents. Extant patent law employs a binary screening process, under which

inventions either qualify for protection or fail. Thereafter, all qualifying

inventions are entitled to the same level of protection irrespective of the

degree of their novelty, utility and nonobviousness. As we establish

throughout this Article, patent law’s failure to distinguish among inventions

based on their quality greatly undermines the patent system’s principal

objective of optimally incentivizing and adequately rewarding innovative

progress. Society, at least in principle, ends up paying the same price for

all qualifying inventions, regardless of their level of innovation and

improvement upon the prior art.

A recent discovery documented robust and reliable individual differences in how quickly people become aware of non-conscious visual stimuli (Sklar, Goldstein, et al., 2021). Given the seemingly large role that conscious experiences play in our lives, this trait is likely to be associated with later cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. Here we examine the possible implications of this trait to perceptual conscious experiences. In two experiments we demonstrate that the speed of prioritization to awareness is correlated with the ability to notice changes in a change blindness paradigm. The first experiment (N = 97) found a correlation between prioritization speed and multiple parameters of change blindness performance. The second, preregistered, replication experiment (N = 99), further demonstrated that variability in other perceptual-decision making tasks cannot account for this correlation. The results of both experiments suggest that prioritization speed is tightly related with conscious experiences in other situations.

Environmental changes driven by anthropogenic activities often disrupt animal communication and mating behavior. Consequently, these changes may force animals to adopt alternative mating tactics and strategies to find a mate. The mating disruption technique is an environmentally friendly tactic often used to control the pink-bollworm moth population in cotton fields. Though mating disruption is eco-friendly, it represents a Human-Induced Rapid Environmental Change for the targeted moths. Mating disruption involves spreading a synthetic version of the species-specific sex pheromone in the field, creating a pheromone-polluted environment, making it difficult for male moths to locate females and thereby reducing mating rates. We hypothesized that the intense sexual selection and environmental changes affecting communication would lead moths to increase their use of alternative mating strategies. An observed alternative mating behavior in male pink bollworm moths is disturbing mating pairs to displace the male and mate with the female. We compared this behavior between two populations and found that males long exposed to mating disruption disturbed mating pairs more frequently than those never exposed to it. In addition, males with a prolonged history of exposure to mating disruption showed reduced choosiness of females and increased their mating rate with small females of lower reproductive potential. The success rate of the observed couple disturbance was low. Nonetheless, this strategy, alongside other strategies, may contribute to the males’ reproductive success when facing the additional challenge of locating females due to the pheromone-polluted environment.

How social complexity evolved remains a long-standing enigma. In most animal groups, social complexity is typically classified into a few discrete classes. This approach is oversimplified and constrains our inference of social evolution to a narrow trajectory consisting of transitions between classes. Such categorical classifications also limit quantitative studies on the molecular and environmental drivers of social complexity. The recent accumulation of relevant quantitative data has set the stage to overcome these limitations. Here, we propose a data-driven, high-dimensional approach for studying the full diversity of social phenotypes. We curated and analyzed a comprehensive dataset encompassing 17 social traits across 80 species and studied the evolution of social complexity in bees. We found that honey bees, stingless bees, and bumble bees underwent a major evolutionary transition ∼80 mya, inconsistent with the stepwise progression of the social ladder conceptual framework. This major evolutionary transition was followed by a phase of substantial phenotypic diversification of social complexity. Other bee lineages display a continuum of social complexity, ranging from solitary to simple societies, but do not reach the levels of social complexity seen in honey bees, stingless bees, and bumble bees. Bee evolution, therefore, provides a remarkable demonstration of a macroevolutionary process in which a major transition removed biological constraints and opened novel evolutionary opportunities, driving the exploration of the landscape of social phenotypes. Our approach can be extended to incorporate additional data types and readily applied to illuminate the evolution of social complexity in other animal groups.

Poor sleep is pervasive in modern society. Poor sleep is associated with major physical and mental health consequences, as well as with impaired cognitive function. Less is known about the relationship between sleep and emotional and interpersonal behavior. In this work, we investigate whether poor sleep impairs empathy, an important building block of human interaction and prosocial behavior. We aimed to capture the effects of poor sleep on the various aspects of empathy: trait and state, affect and cognition.

Study 1 (n = 155) assessed daily habitual sleep over several days, and global sleep quality in the past month. Participants who reported worse sleep quality exhibited lower empathic caring and perspective-taking traits. Study 2 (n = 347) induced a one-night disruption of sleep continuity to test a causal relationship between sleep and empathy. Participants in the sleep disrupted condition had to briefly wake up five times over the night, whereas the sleep-rested controls slept normally. In the next morning, participants’ empathy and prosocial intentions were assessed. Participants in the sleep disruption condition exhibited lower empathic sensitivity and less prosocial decision-making than sleep-rested controls.

The main contribution of this work is in providing a robust demonstration of the multi-faceted detrimental effects of poor sleep on trait and state empathy. Our findings demonstrate that poor sleep causally impairs empathic response to the suffering of others. These findings highlight the need for greater public attention to adequate sleep, which may impact empathy on a societal level.

Emotion perception is a fundamental aspect of our lives because others’ emotions may provide important information about their reactions, attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Following the seminal work of Ekman, much of the research on emotion perception has focused on facial expressions. Recent evidence suggests, however, that facial expressions may be more ambiguous than previously assumed and that context also plays an important role in deciphering the emotional states of others. Here, we adopt a novel approach, breaking down the means and documenting a robust trait in emotion perception. In six experiments with 671 participants, we find evidence for striking individual differences in emotion perception, with different people presenting profound differences in weighting the face versus the extrafacial context. Importantly, these differences are stable over time, stimuli, and paradigms. Our data show that individuals are interpreting identical emotional displays as communicating different emotions. Implications of these robust differences are discussed.

Innovations, such as symbolic artifacts, are a product of cognitive abilities but also of cultural context. Factors that may determine the emergence and retention of an innovation include the population's pre-existing cultural repertoire, exposure to relevant ways of thinking, and the invention's utility. Thus, we suggest that the production of symbolic artifacts is not guaranteed even in cognitively advanced societies.

How can we build trust, especially in polarized societies? We propose that exposure to broad financial markets—where individuals place their assets in the hands of large groups of unfamiliar agents who nonetheless have the incentive and ability to promote their interests—can contribute to generalized trust. In a randomized controlled trial, we encourage Israelis to hold or trade stocks for up to seven weeks. We find that participation in financial markets increases the probability of expressing generalized trust by about 6 percentage points, equivalent to a quarter of the control group mean. The effects seem to be driven by political partisans along the left–right spectrum in Israel, and are robust to negative price changes. Thus, trust is not only a cause but can also be an effect of participation in financial markets.