People, across a wide range of personal and professional domains, need to accurately detect whether the state of the world has changed. Previous research has documented a systematic pattern of over- and under-reaction to signals of change due to system neglect, the tendency to overweight the signals and underweight the system producing the signals. We investigate whether experience, and hence the potential to learn, improves people’s ability to detect change. Participants in our study made probabilistic judgments across 20 trials, each consisting of 10 periods, all in a single system that crossed three levels of diagnosticity (a measure of the informativeness of the signal) with four levels of transition probability (a measure of the stability of the environment). We found that the system-neglect pattern was only modestly attenuated by experience. Although average performance did not increase with experience overall, the degree of learning varied substantially across the 12 systems we investigated, with participants showing significant improvement in some high diagnosticity conditions and none in others. We examine this variation in learning through the lens of a simple linear adjustment heuristic, which we term the “δ-ϵ” model. We show that some systems produce consistent feedback in the sense that the best δ and ϵ responses for one trial also do well on other trials. We show that learning is related to the consistency of feedback, as well as a participant’s “scope for learning” how close their initial judgments are to optimal behavior.

Social interactions frequently take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma as driven predominantly by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social preferences in such contexts. In a series of pre-registered experiments, we show that high levels of cooperation can be sustained when prosocial individuals interact in segregated groups. By comparing their behavior with that of mixed and selfish groups, we highlight the conditions under which other-regarding motivations matter in repeated interactions.

There is a prominent literature explaining how policy entrepreneurs, as active agents, promote policy changes. However, most existing studies focus on policy entrepreneurship at the national level, with limited attention paid to the vibrant dynamics of numerous local government innovations typically driven by entrepreneurial individuals. This systematic review seeks to take stock of the empirical literature on subnational policy entrepreneurship, in order to consolidate scholarly knowledge, identify generalizable patterns, and inform future research. Following a well-established review protocol, we collected 64 articles through a thorough literature search, with 122 sets of individual entrepreneurs reported in the sample, and coded all cases based on individual-level attributes and processual characteristics. Remarkable diversity is noted in terms of (1) the policy sector; (2) forms of entrepreneurship; (3) policy change outcomes; (4) level of jurisdiction; and (5) key characteristics of the individual entrepreneurs. We find salient patterns in the entrepreneurial motivations and strategies used.

The impact of long-term nocturnal warming on soil aggregate stability and carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) sequestration was examined in agricultural fields. Employing a passive warming system, the nighttime warming experiment involved two treatments: a control check (CK) and a nighttime warming treatment (WT), spanning the entire growth seasons of wheat from 2013 to 2021. The annual average temperature increase ranged from 0.3 to 1.3°C, with an average increment of 0.71°C over the eight years. Both dry and wet sieving methods showed that nighttime warming reduced the proportion of macroaggregates and increased microaggregates compared to CK, thereby diminishing soil aggregate (SA) stability. While nighttime warming had the potential to elevate the concentrations and contents of soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN), significant effects were only observed in the concentrations and contribution rates of SOC and TN. The C/N ratios across different particle sizes within SA were not significantly affected by nighttime warming. Additionally, no significant correlation was found between the SOC/TN contents and contribution rates and the stability of SA. These results suggest that eight years of nighttime warming could undermine the stability of SA, yet it did not impact the pools of N and C in the agricultural lands of central China.

We report an anomalous capillary phenomenon that reverses typical capillary trapping via nanoparticle suspension and leads to a counterintuitive self-removal of non-aqueous fluid from dead-end structures under weakly hydrophilic conditions. Fluid interfacial energy drives the trapped liquid out by multiscale surfaces: the nanoscopic structure formed by nanoparticle adsorption transfers the molecular-level adsorption film to hydrodynamic film by capillary condensation, and maintains its robust connectivity, then the capillary pressure gradient in the dead-end structures drives trapped fluid motion out of the pore continuously. The developed mathematical models agree well with the measured evolution dynamics of the released fluid. This reversing capillary trapping phenomenon via nanoparticle suspension can be a general event in a random porous medium and could dramatically increase displacement efficiency. Our findings have implications for manipulating capillary pressure gradient direction via nanoparticle suspensions to trap or release the trapped fluid from complex geometries, especially for site-specific delivery, self-cleaning, or self-recover systems.

Systematic reviewers are ideally placed to detect untrustworthy studies and decrease their use in decision making. The systematic review process already requires rigorous evaluation of an entire body of evidence related to a particular question. Excluding untrustworthy studies from systematic reviews can reduce their subsequent impact on evidence used for decisions and raise awareness of the problem among universities, journal editors, research funders and other stakeholders who can take appropriate action to eliminate them from the scientific literature.

I am so grateful to have been able to think with these authors while reading their books, for both have challenged me to think differently about my previous work and my upbringing in the “Golden State.” Those of us who study religion in the American West know it is still relatively marginalized in our guild, but I see such great hope in these sorts of studies. Not only do these books reveal a great deal about California both as a site of religious coercion and resistance, but they bring to our attention methods, sources, and ways of thinking about the interpenetration of traditionally “religious” ideas and material objects with labor, capital, foodways, photography, office spaces, and domestic interiors.

Limited partnerships (LPs) have received considerable press and policy attention over the past five years, culminating in legal reforms which provide an ability to align LP law more closely to company law. This paper challenges the wisdom of exercising this ability without prior analysis. It draws on historical, conceptual, and empirical methodologies to make three arguments. First, the LP is conceptually different from the company, with LPs being a legal transplant copied from other legal systems, and remaining distinctive: with (mostly) one manager which is meant to have unlimited liability. Secondly, LPs have clear policy aims which are different to those in company law. I use limited liability of an illustration of a policy issue that will be missed by aligning LP law to company law. Thirdly, the LP is overwhelmingly a Scottish vehicle. Recent company law reforms have been argued to be dissonant to Scottish company law, questioning the wisdom of aligning the LP’s regulation to companies.

The international investment regime provides generous protections for foreign investors against adverse legal changes in host states, and unusually strong procedural rights to enforce those protections in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Scholars have observed that the regime enables corporate capital accumulation and raises the costs of climate action, potentially deterring states from adopting ambitious climate policies. Building on this literature, we locate a key source of these concerns in the asymmetric treatment of state and investor behavior in ISDS, which allows investors to depict themselves as innocent victims of “unfair” and “unforeseeable” “political” processes, despite themselves being active political players and sophisticated political risk managers—a tactic we call feigned victimization. This tactic is employed by fossil fuel companies to achieve capital accumulation and climate obstruction goals. We illustrate our argument through an empirical case study of TC Energy’s US$15 billion ISDS claim against the United States in relation to the Biden Administration’s revocation of a permit required to construct the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Our case study also illustrates a method by which states can expose feigned victimization tactics by investors and incorporate evidence of this into their legal defenses in ISDS.

Existing research shows a significant relationship between state racial minority population, the proportion of racial minority welfare recipients, and state levels of racial resentment with the proposal and adoption of punitive welfare policies. This article contributes to the extant literature by expanding on Ledford’s (2018) 2008–2014 analysis of state drug testing proposals by evaluating state-level racial factors and the diffusion of drug testing proposals from 2009 to 2018. Moreover, the author accounts for the potential influence of drug-related variables on the proposal probability by including variables measuring opioid overdose deaths and illicit drug use estimates. Event history analyses do not find that the size of a state’s Black population or the percentage or proportion of Black welfare recipients significantly affects the proposal rates. However, higher estimates of state-level racial resentment increase the likelihood of proposing drug testing for welfare legislation, supporting Ledford’s conclusion that racial biases matter in the diffusion of these policies. In addition, the author has found evidence that while opioid overdoses are negatively associated with the likelihood of proposal, estimates of illicit drug use have the opposite effect. Finally, analyses suggest that liberalism in state governments actually increases the probability of a proposal.

Florpyrauxifen-benzyl is a postemergence (POST) rice herbicide that has reduced rice yield in some situations, and producers are concerned that the impact could be even greater with low rice seeding densities. Therefore, research was conducted in Stoneville, MS, from 2019 to 2021 to evaluate the effect of florpyrauxifen-benzyl on rice yield when a hybrid was seeded at reduced densities. Hybrid rice ‘RT 7521 FP’ was seeded at 10, 17, 24, 30, and 37 kg ha-1. At the four-leaf to one-tiller growth stage, florpyrauxifen-benzyl was applied at 0 or 59 g ai ha-1. Rice injury following the application of florpyrauxifen-benzyl was ≤ 8% across all seeding rates and evaluation intervals. Application of florpyrauxifen-benzyl reduced plant heights by 14% across all seeding rates but did not result in delayed rice maturity. When florpyrauxifen-benzyl was not applied rice in the 10 and 17 kg ha-1 seeding rates, rice matured slower than when seeded at 24, 30, and 37 kg ha-1. When florpyrauxifen-benzyl was applied, rough rice grain yields were reduced by 17 and 37 kg ha-1 but not at any other seeding rate. In conclusion, the application of florpyrauxifen-benzyl at a 2x rate can cause a loss of yield resulting from variation in rice densities.