Daniel Nettle

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Verified

Daniel verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Research Director at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris

Why do many people morally condemn unrestrained indulgence in bodily pleasures—such as gluttony, masturbation, and drinking alcohol—even when these behaviors do not harm others? Leading theories of moral cognition claim that these puritanical moral judgments are independent of cognitive adaptations for reciprocal cooperation. In five pre-registered...

Anxiety is often seen as a driver of far-right politics in British political culture that is strategically irrational insofar as the consequences of the policies pursued by such parties contribute to an increase in poverty and inequality, which are drivers of anxiety. This article shows that anxiety can also drive voter support for strategically ra...

Why do many people morally condemn unrestrained indulgence in bodily pleasures—such as gluttony, masturbation, and drinking alcohol—even when these behaviors do not harm others? Leading theories of moral cognition claim that these puritanical moral judgments are independent of cognitive adaptations for reciprocal cooperation. In five pre-registered...

The impacts of poverty and material scarcity on human decision making appear paradoxical. One set of findings associates poverty with risk aversion, whilst another set associates it with risk taking. We present an idealized general model, the ‘desperation threshold model’ (DTM), that explains how both these accounts can be correct. The DTM assumes...

There is growing evidence of a causal relationship between income and health. At the same time, pressure on reactive health and care services in the UK is increasing. Previous work to quantify the relationship has focused on particular age groups, conditions, or single-item self-rated health. This article reports findings from a study that aimed to...

It is widely established that social determinants influence multiple adverse life outcomes such as becoming depressed, living in poverty, and mortality. Although causal beliefs are core to understanding public views on these issues, studies of beliefs about social causes have occurred in parallel literatures with diverging outcomes of interest and...

It is widely established that social determinants influence multiple adverse life outcomes such as becoming depressed, living in poverty, and mortality. Although causal beliefs are core to understanding public views on these issues, studies of beliefs about social causes have occurred in parallel literatures with diverging outcomes of interest and...

Decision-making relies on heuristics derived from past experiences. Past experiences are likely to vary with socioeconomic status. We investigate socioeconomic differences in people’s reliance on a risk-reward heuristic, which exploits the tendency for larger rewards to be less probable. We analyze participants’ probability estimates in a lottery e...

Decision-making relies on heuristics derived from past experiences. Past experiences are likely to vary with socioeconomic status. We investigate socioeconomic differences in people’s reliance on a risk-reward heuristic, which exploits the tendency for larger rewards to be less probable. We analyze participants’ probability estimates in a lottery e...

Food insecurity is associated with increased odds of anxiety and depression, but it is unclear whether this effect is causal, and if so, the timescale over which it occurs. We conducted a preregistered analysis of an intensive longitudinal dataset, the Changing Cost of Living Study, to explore evidence for causal processes linking food insecurity t...

Why do many people morally condemn unrestrained indulgence in bodily pleasures—such as gluttony, masturbation, and drinking alcohol—even when these behaviors do not harm others? Leading theories of moral cognition claim that these puritanical moral judgments are independent of cognitive adaptations for reciprocal cooperation. In five pre-registered...

In situations of poverty, do people take more or less risk? One hypothesis states that poverty makes people avoid risk, because they cannot buffer against losses, while another states that poverty makes people take risks, because they have little to lose. Each hypothesis has some previous empirical support. Here, we test the ‘desperation threshold’...

Basic Income is a largely unconditional, regular payment to all permanent residents to support basic needs. It has been proposed as an upstream health intervention by increasing income size and security. Modelling has quantified prospective effects on UK young people’s mental health. This paper extends this analysis to mental and physical health am...

Welfare policies have often been assessed on their financial impacts, for example, their effects on net household incomes and marginal and average tax rates. However, welfare policies can also have a substantial effect on population health and wellbeing. In addition, politicians must consider the electoral implications of policies that would affect...

Socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to psychological and behavioral outcomes like time discounting, trust, sense of control, and life satisfaction. This pre-registered study examines daily hassles—routine stressors in everyday life—as contributors to SES-related differences in stress, attitudes, decision-making, and well-being. 230 UK participants...

Interpersonal trust impacts societal and individual outcomes, affecting economic growth, democracy, and well-being. Trust levels vary both within and across countries, raising the question of what factors influence interpersonal trust. Existing research indicates that an individual’s socioeconomic status influences their level of trust, with wealth...

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has described the UK economy as being in its worst state since the aftermath of WWII. But the Government’s new fiscal rules mean that it has shied away from a Beveridge-style public investment package that made Attlee’s administration from 1945 so successful. The change to the definition of debt annou...

Purpose Food acquisition is an adaptive problem resolved via both physiological and psychological processes. Hunger could serve as a coordinating mechanism for these processes. When hunger increases, it may be beneficial to shift cognitive resources away from other adaptive problems and towards functions that increase the chances of acquiring food,...

Studies of aversion to health inequality have found that this is often greater when health outcomes are presented as varying with socioeconomic conditions. We sought to understand better why this is by studying the cognitive appraisals made about health inequality when presented with distinct explanatory framings. Across two pre‐registered studies...

Poverty is associated with psychological variables such as increased anxiety, increased depression, steeper time discounting and greater risk aversion. However, less is known about whether short‐term changes in financial circumstances are coupled to immediate psychological responses. We present data from the Changing Cost of Living study, in which...

Food insecurity (FI) is associated with obesity in women in high-income countries, but causal mechanisms remain unclear. FI is often assumed to lead to increased levels of hunger. However, quantitative evidence describing daily experiences of hunger in FI is lacking. Our pre-registered study used ecological momentary assessment to capture experienc...

Food acquisition is an adaptive problem resolved via both physiological and psychological processes. Hunger could serve as a coordinating mechanism for these processes. When hunger increases, it may be beneficial to shift cognitive resources away from other adaptive problems and towards functions that increase the chances of acquiring food, such as...

In situations of poverty, do people take more or less risk? Some theories state that poverty makes people 'vulnerable': they cannot buffer against losses, and therefore avoid risk. Yet, other theories state the opposite: poverty makes people 'desperate': they have little left to lose, and therefore take risks. Each theory has some support: most stu...

Do people in different societies experience morality differently in everyday life? Using experience sampling methods, we investigate everyday moral experiences in a sample from 20 countries across 6 continents, thereby replicating and extending a large-scale study originally conducted in the United States and Canada. We aim to replicate key finding...

Do people in different societies experience morality differently in everyday life? Using experience sampling methods, we investigate everyday moral experiences in a sample from 20 countries across 6 continents, thereby replicating and extending a large-scale study originally conducted in the United States and Canada. We aim to replicate key finding...

Poverty is associated with psychological variables such as increased anxiety, increased depression, steeper time discounting and greater risk aversion. However, less is known about whether short-term changes in financial circumstances are coupled to immediate psychological responses. We present data from the Changing Cost of Living study, in which...

Everybody wants it. But what exactly is happiness? The pursuit of happiness has been recognized by everyone from poets to politicians as what makes the world go round. The world ‘s largest and fastest-growing industries - alcohol, pharmaceuticals, mind altering drugs, self-help books, counselling, travel and tourism - all profit heavily from our in...

Few people know that nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia’s 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world’s languages may die out in the next century. What has happened to these voices? Should we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic...

Why are some people worriers, and others wanderers? Why do some people seem good at empathising, and others at controlling? We have something deep and consistent within us that determines the choices we make and the situations we bring about. But why should members of the same species differ so markedly in their natures? What is the best personalit...

Here we introduce a Special Section of Child Development entitled “Formalizing Theories of Child Development.” This Special Section features five papers that use mathematical models to advance our understanding of central questions in the study of child development. This landmark collection is timely: it signifies growing awareness that rigorous em...

Coproduction has emerged as one of the key concepts in understanding knowledge-policy interactions and is associated with involvement, for example, of users of public services in their design and delivery. At a time of permacrisis, the need for transformative evidence-based policymaking is urgent and great. This is particularly important in highly...

Co-production has emerged as one of the key concepts in understanding knowledge-policy interactions and is associated with involvement, for example, of users of public services in their design and delivery. At a time of permacrisis, the need for transformative evidence-based policymaking is urgent and great. This is particularly important in highly...

What do people want from a welfare system? Previous research has suggested a list of possible features, such as that the system: reduces poverty; reduces inequality; improves mental and physical health; costs little; and rewards only the deserving. How do these different features trade off against one another to determine overall desirability? To a...

The proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds in England reporting a longstanding mental health condition increased almost 10-fold between 1995 and 2014. Studies demonstrate an association between income and anxiety and depression, with bi-directional effects. There is also emerging evidence that cash transfers may mitigate, prevent or delay those conditio...

Background Early life adversity results in accelerated ageing, which has been detected using molecular markers of ageing such as telomere length and DNA methylation, even in chronologically young people. Animal models have shown that accelerated ageing leads to a decreased willingness to wait for delayed rewards – a relationship thus far not observ...

Background: Health inequalities are typically presented with respect to separate groupings or bases of categorization, such as income-related health inequality or life expectancy by education. We sought to characterize the cognitive consequences of presenting health inequality by bases of categorization. Methods:Across two studies (N = 1,321), UK a...

Explanations for human behaviour can be framed in many different ways, from the social-structural context to the individual motivation down to the neurobiological implementation. We know comparatively little about how people interpret these explanatory framings, and what they infer when one kind of explanation rather than another is made salient. I...

People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime. It is not clear why it makes sense for them to do so, given that apprehension and punishment may make their situation even worse. Recent theory suggests that people should be more willing to steal if they are on the wrong side of a ‘desperation threshold’; that is, a l...

The last 30 years has seen the emergence of a self-styled ‘evolutionary’ paradigm within psychology (henceforth, EP). EP is often presented and critiqued as a distinctive, contentious paradigm, to be contrasted with other accounts of human psychology. However, little attention has been paid to the sense in which those other accounts are not also ev...

People like to distinguish between capacities that are ‘innate’, ‘in the genes’ or ‘biological’ and those that are ‘acquired’, ‘learned’ or ‘psychological’. These are, or at least build on, folk distinctions. We hypothesize that they represent characteristic processes of, respectively: intuitive biology, the evolved cognitive system for gathering k...

To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while neverth...

People make many inferences based on cues of wealth. These inferences regarding the character and behavior of others have real-life consequences, for example, social distancing from individuals at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. In this cross-cultural study, we investigate the association between perceived wealth and perceived trustwo...

Hunger is a powerful driver of eating behaviour. However, the relationship between hunger and food-related cognition remains poorly understood. Previous research found that hunger increased the ability of food cues to capture attention in a US student sample (N=23; Piech, Pastorino, & Zald, Appet., 54, p579-582, 2010). We conducted online (N=29) an...

In this paper we study the impact of having used an automated taxi (AT) or simply living in a city where ATs are operating on users’ preferences for and attitudes toward ATs. This paper aims then to contribute to the research on ATs and on the impact of experiencing innovations. Data were collected in three major cities in China where ATs were in o...

There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or ‘enduring neighbourhood effects’. Here, we identify a single mechanism that can produce all three observations. We formalize it in a mathem...

Early life adversity results in accelerated ageing, which has been detected using molecular markers of ageing such as telomere length and DNA methylation, even in chronologically young people. Further, animal models have shown that accelerated ageing leads to a decreased willingness to wait for delayed rewards. Our study aimed to develop a simpler...

Studies have shown that people hold a number of stereotypes associated with wealth, wherein individuals of higher socio-economic status are often perceived as more competent, yet less warm. These wealth-based stereotypes can be activated by a diverse range of cues, such as clothing, accents, food preferences or facial expressions. The effects of th...

Poster presentation in the 102nd Transportation Research Board. Washington DC, USA. January 2023

If policy preferences follow material interests, the experience of socioeconomic disadvantage ought to increase support for redistributive policies. However, experiencing disadvantage might also reduce faith in government's ability to make things better, indirectly reducing support for redistributive action, and leading to a spiral of widening disa...

Scientists have developed different framings to explain human behaviour, from the structural context to the individual motivation down to the neurobiological implementation. We know comparatively little about how non-experts interpret these scientific framings, and what they infer when one framing rather than another is made salient. In four experi...

People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime. It is not clear why it makes sense for them to do so, given that apprehension and punishment may make their situation even worse. A recent theoretical model explored the consequences of positing a desperation threshold, a critical level of resources below which it is d...

This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust as part of a project entitled Assessing the prospective impacts of Universal Basic Income (UBI) on anxiety and depression among 14-24-year-olds. This serves as a pilot study for our much broader, long-term examination of the role of Universal Basic Income as a public health measure. The project commenced...

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often presented as desirable in theory, but unsaleable electorally. Policymakers fear intuitive, ‘values’-based opposition from socially conservative voters, whom the policy would benefit materially, but who might regard it as ‘giving others something for nothing’. We provide evidence from ‘red wall’ constituencies i...

There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or ‘enduring neighbourhood effects’. Here, we identify a single mechanism that can produce all three observations. We formalise it in a mathem...

https://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/winning-the-vote-with-a-universal-basic-income-evidence-from-the-red-wall/ This report, backed by North of Tyne and Greater Manchester mayors and councillors across the North, suggests that a basic income could be the key to Labour’s success in regaining its former heartlands at the next election, with...

Greater income inequality is associated with lower average wellbeing. There are multiple possible explanations for this pattern. We use data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2012 (27,571 respondents from 28 countries) to evaluate the contributions of different causal pathways to associations between national income inequality and wellbeing....

This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust as part of a project entitled Assessing the prospective impacts of Universal Basic Income (UBI) on anxiety and depression among 14-24-year-olds. This serves as a pilot study for our much broader, long-term examination of the role of Universal Basic Income as a public health measure. The project commenced...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand public perceptions of the role of income for improving mental health, since public perceptions shape political decision-making. Socioeconomic determinants such as poverty cause a great deal of mental ill-health, yet it is not clear whether the general public believes this to be true. Lay understand...

Background. Across countries and states, greater income inequality is associated with lower wellbeing. There are multiple causal pathways that could produce such an association. If the relationship of individual income to wellbeing is downward concave, greater dispersion of the income distribution must reduce average wellbeing. More unequal countri...

Why do many people morally condemn unrestrained indulgence in bodilypleasures—such as gluttony, masturbation, and drinking alcohol—even when these behaviorsdo not harm others? Leading theories of moral cognition claim that these puritanical moral judgments are independent of cognitive adaptations for reciprocal cooperation. In five pre-registered e...

Why do many people morally condemn unrestrained indulgence in bodily pleasures—such as gluttony, masturbation, and drinking alcohol—even when these behaviors do not harm others? Leading theories of moral cognition claim that these puritanical moral judgments are independent of cognitive adaptations for reciprocal cooperation. In five pre-registered...

Background. Despite increasing recognition that clinical interventions are insufficient to improve mental health without corresponding emphasis on population mental health, few studies have compared public perspectives on population and clinical interventions.Aims. We begin to address this here by examining views of one intervention that holds cons...

Across human societies, people form "thick" relationships characterized by strong attachments, obligations, and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships share food utensils, kiss, or engage in other distinctive interactions that involve sharing saliva. We found that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share saliva (as o...

Across human societies, people form ‘thick’ relationships, characterized by strong attachments, obligations and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships engage in distinctive interactions, like sharing food utensils or kissing, that involve sharing saliva. Here we show that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share sali...

The last thirty years has seen the emergence of a self-styled ‘evolutionary’ paradigm within psychology (henceforth, EP). EP is often presented and critiqued as a distinctive, contentious paradigm, to be contrasted with other accounts of human psychology. However, little attention has been paid to the sense in which those other accounts are not evo...

The aim of this study was to identify the dietary-intake correlates of food insecurity in UK adults. We recruited groups of low-income participants who were classified as food insecure (n = 196) or food secure (n = 198). Participants completed up to five 24h dietary recalls. There was no difference in total energy intake by food insecurity status (...

We postulate that at least two distinct cognitive systems affect political judgements. The first system, moral cognition, delivers intuitions about what societal outcomes would be ideal. The second system, which we dub the intuitive theory of social motivation, makes predictions about how other citizens will behave in practice, and hence feeds into...

Birds exposed to food insecurity—defined as temporally variable access to food—respond adaptively by storing more energy. To do this, they may reduce energy allocation to other functions such as somatic maintenance and repair. To investigate this trade-off, we exposed juvenile European starlings ( Sturnus vulgaris , n = 69) to 19 weeks of either un...

Impulsivity, in the sense of the extent rewards are devalued as the time until their realization increases, is linked to various negative outcomes in humans, yet understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying it is limited. Variation in the imprecision of interval timing is a possible contributor to variation in impulsivity. We use a numerica...

Food insecurity—defined as limited or unpredictable access to nutritionally adequate food—is associated with higher body mass in humans and birds. It is widely assumed that food insecurity-induced fattening is caused by increased food consumption, but there is little evidence supporting this in any species. We developed a novel technology for measu...

Impulsivity refers to the valuation of future rewards relative to immediate ones. From an evolutionary perspective, we should expect impulsivity to be sensitive to the current state of the organism (for example, hunger), and also its long-term developmental history. There is evidence that both current hunger and childhood socioeconomic deprivation...

How do the dietary intake patterns of people exposed to food insecurity differ from those of people who are food secure? A recent study of a US sample found that food insecurity was associated with greater reliance on carbohydrate, a lower diversity of food, and more variable time gaps between eating. We examined whether these features were also pr...

The onset of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic led to a marked increase in positive discussion of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in political and media circles. However, we do not know whether there was a corresponding increase in support for the policy in the public at large, or why. Here, we present three studies carried out during 2020 in UK and U...

Researchers increasingly wish to test hypotheses concerning the impact of environmental or disease exposures on telomere length (TL), and use longitudinal study designs to do so. In population studies, TL is usually measured using a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)-based method. This method has been validated by presenting a correlatio...

How do people arrive at their opinions regarding how society should be governed? We suggest people possess an intuitive theory of human nature. The function of this theory is to predict how strangers will behave in particular classes of situation, and suggest what kinds of institutions and interventions are required to make society function under t...

Humans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitatio...

Background A large body of evidence indicates the importance of upstream determinants to health. Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been suggested as an upstream intervention capable of promoting health by affecting material, biopsychosocial and behavioural determinants. Calls are emerging across the political spectrum to introduce an emergency UBI t...

Plasticity is studied across the social and biological sciences, but communication between disciplines is hindered by differences in the concepts used to do so. For instance, the distinction between expectant and dependent plasticity is widely used in psychology, but rarely used in evolutionary biology. As a consequence, researchers are less likely...

This paper represents a collaboration between a policy researcher and a behavioural scientist who studies cooperation. Our goal was to develop a shared understanding of one particular policy topic, the reforms to the UK system of disability benefits initiated during the last term of the New Labour Government and accelerated under the Conservative-l...

Objective People have the intuition that hunger undermines social cooperation, but experimental tests of this have often produced null results. One possible explanation is that the experimental tasks used are not rich enough to capture the diverse pathways by which social cooperation can be sustained or break down in real life. We studied the effec...

The COVID-19 pandemic is projected to cause an economic shock larger than the global financial crisis of 2007−2008 and a recession as great as anything seen since the Great Depression in 1930s. The social and economic consequences of lockdowns and social distancing measures, such as unemployment, broken relationships and homelessness, create potent...

The 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic has led to a marked increase in positive discussion of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in political and media circles. However, we do not know whether there has been a corresponding increase in support for the policy in the public at large, or why. Here, we present two studies carried out in April and May 2020 in UK a...

The term ‘life-history theory’ (LHT) is increasingly often invoked in psychology, as a framework for integrating understanding of psychological traits into a broader evolutionary context. Although LHT as presented in psychology papers (LHT-P) is typically described as a straightforward extension of the theoretical principles from evolutionary biolo...

In this commentary, we ask when rationalization is most likely to occur and to not occur, and about where to expect, and how to measure, its benefits.

Humans sometimes cooperate, and sometimes exploit one another. The prevalence of interpersonal exploitation is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime and lower trust. Models of the evolution of cooperation have not yet shown why this should be. We created an evolutionary model of cooperat...

For decades, parts of the literature on human culture have been gripped by an analogy: culture changes in a way that is substantially isomorphic to genetic evolution. This leads to a number of sub-claims: that design-like properties in cultural traditions should be explained in a parallel way to the design-like features of organisms, namely with re...

Many human societies feature institutions for redistributing resources from some individuals to others, but preferred levels of redistribution vary greatly within and between populations. We postulate that support for redistribution is the output of a structured cognitive system that is sensitive to features of the social situation. We developed an...