Magnitude-sensitivity: rethinking decision-making

The cover of the January issue of the magazine Trends in Cognitive Sciences shows a human brain composed of a honeybee swarm. The artwork depicts two seemingly distant biological systems that present striking similarities in decision dynamics and properties of information processing. Inspired by the study of house-hunting honeybees, recent research has established that performance in decision-making is affected in predictable ways by the overall goal-relevant magnitude of the alternatives. Magnitude-sensitivity has been observed in humans performing a wide variety of tasks and in organisms as diverse as non-human primates and aneural slime molds. Angelo Pirrone and colleagues review the literature and highlight how prominent accounts of theoretical, descriptive, and normative decision-making had to be revisited to explain magnitude-sensitivity.
A. Pirrone, A. Reina, T. Stafford, J.A.R. Marshall, F. Gobet. Magnitude-sensitivity: rethinking decision-making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 26(1), 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.10.006

Read the full article at: www.sciencedirect.com

The Great 1976 Tangshan Earthquake: Learning from the 1966-1976 Chinese Prediction Program

Euan Mearns and Didier Sornette

From 1966 to 1976, four large earthquakes shook the Bohai Bay rift basin of Northeast China. This prompted the Chinese to launch one of the world’s largest social and science experiments into earthquake prediction that would engage tens of thousands of common people. The climax of this came in February 1975 where a prediction was made hours before the Haicheng earthquake struck. Evacuation of the city of Yingkou and some rural districts saved thousands of lives. The Chinese were jubilant, believing they had cracked the earthquake prediction conundrum. Eighteen months later, however, on the 28th July, 1976, jubilation turned to despair when a great earthquake flattened the large industrial city of Tangshan resulting in 250,000 to 650,000 casualties. This book describes the geological, technical, political and sociological backgrounds to the Haicheng prediction success and the Tangshan prediction failure.
Ahead of the Tangshan earthquake, Chinese seismologists had accumulated significant information that suggested an earthquake was imminent and came close to making a prediction. With improved knowledge and vastly improved ability to accumulate, consolidate and analyse data, this book suggests that Tangshan could have been predicted today using techniques developed in China in that epic decade of discovery. Building on these insights, it also offers a viable future pathway towards earthquake predictions that combines the insights and organisation of the 1966-1976 Chinese prediction program with modern technologies, in order to facilitate data gathering, interpretation and sharing.

More at: www.cambridgescholars.com

The dynamics of political polarization

The dynamics of political polarization
Simon A. Levin, Helen V. Milner, and Charles Perrings

PNAS December 14, 2021 118 (50) e2116950118;

A number of trends in national and international politics greatly affect our capacity to achieve the cooperation that will be necessary to address the challenges facing society over the coming decades. These involve the interplay among partisanship and party loyalties within countries, populism, and polarization within and among nations. The trends are widespread and seem to be reshaping politics across the globe. They are inherently systems-level phenomena, involving interactions among multiple component parts and the emergence of broader-scale features; yet, they have been inadequately explored from that perspective.

To make progress in understanding these issues, political-science research stands to benefit from insights from other disciplines, including evolutionary biology, systems science, and the disciplines concerned with the fair and efficient provision of public goods of all kinds, but especially those affecting the shared environment and public health. These other disciplines, in turn, stand to gain equally from the perspective developed in political science. In viewing political systems as complex adaptive systems, we can gain a new understanding of the forces that shape current trends, and how that knowledge might affect governance strategies going forward. Extreme polarization is a dangerous phenomenon that requires greater scientific attention to address effectively.

This Special Feature of PNAS draws on this relatively new interdisciplinary field, featuring original joint research from collaborating political scientists and complex systems theorists. Each paper is a true partnership among the different disciplines and illustrates the benefits of closer ties between complex systems and social science. The papers explore the emergence of patterns and structures in societies and the linkages among individual behaviors and societal benefits across scales of space, time, and organizational complexity. The COVID-19 pandemic provides the most recent examples of how patterns of polarization in societies interact with our abilities to solve societal challenges.

Read the full article at: www.pnas.org

The rise and fall of rationality in language

Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen

PNAS December 21, 2021 118 (51) e2107848118

The post-truth era has taken many by surprise. Here, we use massive language analysis to demonstrate that the rise of fact-free argumentation may perhaps be understood as part of a deeper change. After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.

Read the full article at: www.pnas.org