The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study site selection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires of the community regarding research approach and methodology, community involvement, results communication and distribution, and data sharing are held in the highest regard by the researchers. We argue that such considerations are central to scientific rigour and the foundation of the study of human behaviour.

The difficulty of avoiding dangerous climate change arises from a tension between group and self-interest1–3 and is exacerbated by climate change’s intergenerational nature4. The present generation bears the costs of cooperation, whereas future generations accrue the benefits if present cooperation succeeds, or suffer if present cooperation fails. Although temporal discounting has long been known to matter in making individual choices5, the extent of temporal discounting is poorly understood in a group setting. We represent the effect of both intra- and intergenerational discounting4,6,7 through a collective-risk group experiment framed around climate change. Participants could choose to cooperate or to risk losing an additional endowment with a high probability. The rewards of defection were immediate, whereas the rewards of cooperation were delayed by one day, delayed by seven weeks (intragenerational discounting), or delayed by several decades and spread over a much larger number of potential beneficiaries (intergenerational discounting). We find that intergenerational discounting leads to a marked decrease in cooperation; all groups failed to reach the collective target. Intragenerational discounting was weaker by comparison. Our results experimentally confirm that international negotiations to mitigate climate change are unlikely to succeed if individual countries’ short-term gains can arise only fromdefection

In a heated debate about the proximity of COVID-19 herd immunity, White House health advisor Dr Scott Atlas proclaimed 'You're supposed to believe the science, and I'm telling you the science' 1 . A group of infectious disease experts and former colleagues from Stanford, however, publicly criticized Dr Atlas, who is a radiologist, for spreading 'falsehoods and misrepresentation of science' through his statements about face masks, social distancing and the safety of community transmission 2 . In the 2020 pandemic crisis, all eyes turned to scientific experts to provide advice, guidelines and remedies; from COVID-19 alarmists to sceptics, appeal to scientific authority appeared a prevalent strategy on both sides of the political spectrum. Please see the Supplementary Information for a short commentary on how the current work might relate to the COVID-19 situation.A large body of research has shown that the credibility of a statement is heavily influenced by the perceived credibility of its source [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . Children and adults are sensitive to the past track record of informants [11][12][13][14][15][16] , evidence of their benevolence toward the recipient of testimony [17][18][19] , as well as how credible the information is at face value 20,21 . From an evolutionary perspective, deference to credible authorities such as teachers, doctors and scientists is an adaptive strategy that enables effective cultural learning and knowledge transmission [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] . Indeed, if the source is considered a trusted expert, people are willing to believe claims from that source without fully understanding them. We dub this 'the Einstein effect'; people simply accept that E = mc 2 and that antibiotics can help cure pneumonia because credible authorities such as Einstein and their doctor say so, without actually understanding what these statements truly entail.Knowing that a statement originates from an epistemic authority may thus increase the likelihood of opaque messages being interpreted as meaningful and profound. According to Sperber 29 , in some cases, incomprehensible statements from credible sources may be appreciated not just in spite of, but by virtue of their incomprehensibility, as exemplified by the speech of spiritual or intellectual gurus (the 'Guru effect'). Here, we investigate to what extent different epistemic authorities affect the perceived value of nonsensical information. To this end, we contrasted judgements of gobbledegook spoken by a spiritual leader with gobbledegook spoken

In collective risk dilemmas, cooperation prevents collective loss only when players contribute sufficiently. In these more complex variants of a social dilemma, the form of the risk curve is crucial and can strongly affect the feasibility of a cooperative outcome. The risk typically depends on the sum of all individual contributions. Here, we introduce a general approach to analyze the stabilization of cooperation under any decreasing risk curve and discuss how different risk curves affect cooperative outcomes. We show that the corresponding solutions can be reached by social learning or evolutionary dynamics. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to cases where individuals do not only care about their expected payoff, but also about the associated distribution of payoffs. This approach is an essential step to understand the effects of risk decay on cooperation.