EurekAlert! News by Subject: Social & Behavior - Home

Social & Behavior

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 27-Oct-2026 09:16 ET (27-Oct-2026 13:16 GMT/UTC)

New studies point to stronger support for working parents as key to child development

National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
Reports and Proceedings

Presented at the Population Association of Singapore (PAS) 2026 Annual Conference, new Singapore studies explore how modern family life, from infant childcare and paternity leave to children’s growing use of AI, is reshaping parenting and child development. The findings will also inform a joint NUS Medicine–PAS white paper on fertility and human development.

AI can seem more human than real humans in a classic Turing test, study finds

University of California - San Diego
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new University of California San Diego study unveils the first empirical evidence that a modern artificial intelligence system can pass the Turing test — a major scientific benchmark that asks whether a machine can imitate human conversation so convincingly that people can’t reliably tell it apart from a real person. In a series of experiments, people were often unable to tell the difference between humans and advanced large language models (LLMs).

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Artificial intelligence struggles to understand the Mainz dialect

Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz
Reports and Proceedings

How well do language models understand Meenzerisch, the dialect spoken in the German city of Mainz? A research team has investigated this question for the first time. The study's findings, recently presented at the 2026 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), show that current artificial intelligence (AI) models have great difficulty understanding the dialect correctly.

Social factors might play a bigger role than proximity in individual healthcare choices, study finds

Society for Risk Analysis
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An estimated 15.8 million people in the United States live in pharmacy deserts. With limited access to healthcare services, like hospitals and pharmacies, these individuals are at risk of elevated mortality risk and higher rates of preventable disease progression.

Journal: Risk Analysis

Grokipedia selectively drawing on more-right leaning news sources, new study

Trinity College Dublin
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A large-scale analysis of Grokipedia, the world’s first AI-written encyclopedia, has found that while many Grokipedia articles closely resemble their Wikipedia counterparts, a substantial subset diverged markedly in style, sourcing, and political leaning.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Funder: Research Ireland

The Universitat Jaume I and its Board of Trustees present the book "Benicàssim. Espacio y sociedad"

Universitat Jaume I
Book Announcement

The Universitat Jaume I and its Social Council have presented the book Benicàssim. Espacio y sociedad, a collective work directed by Vicent Ortells and edited by Manuel Chust, offering a comprehensive overview of the town’s historical, social and cultural development.

The publication brings together 32 specialists from the humanities and social sciences to analyse topics such as territory, society, economy and heritage from prehistory to the present day, providing a rigorous and multidisciplinary perspective.

Incheon National University research turns customer reviews into actionable guidance

Incheon National University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Service quality improvement requires a holistic approach to analyze customer reviews and identify relevant, actionable issues. Researchers from South Korea have addressed this by developing a model that integrates service-specific aspects and customer actions, which are typically analyzed separately in text mining studies. They also validated the model using online customer reviews of a metaverse platform, demonstrating its potential to help service managers identify high-priority issues and allocate resources strategically.

Journal: Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services