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Social & Behavior

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 9-May-2026 17:15 ET (9-May-2026 21:15 GMT/UTC)

Pleasant-sounding words are easier to remember

University of Vienna
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Which words do we find beautiful? And do beautifully sounding words stick better in memory? A new study led by linguist Theresa Matzinger from the University of Vienna suggests that the phonemic composition of words influences as how beautiful we perceive them to be, and how well we remember them. The findings have just been published in the journal PLOS One.

Journal: PLOS One

Marriage, emotional support may protect against obesity through brain-gut connection, study finds

University of California - Los Angeles Health Sciences
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Strong social relationships, particularly high-quality marriages, may help protect against obesity by influencing a complex communication system between the brain and gut, according to new research by UCLA Health.

Journal: Gut Microbes

Socially aware AI helps autonomous vehicles weave through crowds without collisions

ELSP
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers from Tongji University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed a socially aware prediction-to-control pipeline that lets autonomous vehicles safely navigate dense crowds by anticipating multiple ways pedestrians might move. Instead of betting on a single forecast, their system combines a Social GAN trajectory predictor with a real-time Model Predictive Control (MPC) planner, treating each predicted path as a moving obstacle. In dynamic crowd simulations, the integrated Social GAN+MPC controller achieved zero safety violations and maintained comfortable motion, all while meeting strict real-time computing limits—offering a practical route toward zero-collision autonomous driving in busy urban environments.

Journal: Robot Learning

Concern over harmful medical advice from social media influencers

BMJ Group
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Biased or misleading medical advice shared by social media influencers can cause harm and requires coordinated action by governments and platforms to protect the public, argue experts in The BMJ today.

Journal: The BMJ

To make AI more fair, tame complexity

University of Texas at Austin
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Biases in AI’s models and algorithms can actively harm some of its users and promote social injustice. Documented biases have led to different medical treatments due to patients’ demographics and corporate hiring tools that discriminate against female and Black candidates.

New research from Texas McCombs suggests both a previously unexplored source of AI biases and some ways to correct for them: complexity.

Journal: MIS Quarterly

A rose by any other name? Not necessarily—how words sound aesthetically correlates with their memorability, study finds

PLOS
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A rose by any other name? Not necessarily—how words sound aesthetically correlates with their memorability, study finds

Journal: PLOS One

Scores of dinosaurs walked and swam along a Bolivian shoreline

PLOS
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A fossil site in Bolivia preserves thousands of traces of dinosaurs who walked, ran, and swam along an ancient coastline, according to a study published December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Raúl Esperante of the Geoscience Research Institute, California, U.S., and colleagues.

Journal: PLOS One