Social dynamics of AI adoption in parents' educational decisions.

August 4, 2026| Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

When adopting a performance-enhancing technology offers short-run relative advantages, competitive pressure can drive diffusion even if most adopters would prefer a collective ban. We study this dynamic in the context of unrestricted AI tools for teenagers' education. In preregistered, incentive-compatible experiments with approximately 2,000 parents in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, we elicit willingness to pay for a three-month premium subscription to a leading general-purpose AI platform. Demand increases steeply with the share of other teenagers using AI: Moving perceived peer take-up from 20% to 80% raises willingness to pay by more than 60%. We then test whether information about emerging evidence on potential downstream skill effects changes behavior. Risk information substantially shifts incentivized beliefs about longer-run impacts but has little effect on individual demand, yet it strongly increases support for school-level restrictions. Follow-up experiments show that peer-adoption information does not significantly shift perceived AI quality, the importance parents assign to core skills, or support for bans, pointing to social pressure rather than social learning as the primary channel. The results reveal a rat-race dynamic in which individual adoption responds to peers even as collective preferences shift toward restriction.

Read the original source →

Global greenhouse gas cobenefits of US irrigated agriculture.

Land use and land conversion for agriculture contribute nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making the sector a key priority for emissions reductions. Crop yields are one factor that modulate agricultural land demand, with, all else equal, global land use change increasing with yield declines and decreasing with yield gains. Therefore, agricultural practices drive both direct, on-farm emissions, and indirect land use change emissions through yield effects. Here, we couple

Society & CultureSeptember 27, 2026

Cerebellar microcircuits enable robust evidence-based decisions through cortico-cerebellar coupling.

The cerebellum is increasingly implicated in perceptual decision-making, yet it remains unclear how the cerebellar cortex can support sparse evidence accumulation over behavioral time scales without assuming cortical-style dense local excitatory recurrence. We present a biologically constrained modeling framework showing that cerebellar microcircuits can implement graded accumulation and competition in the absence of such recurrence. In our model, type-II Purkinje-neuron excitability generates f

Society & CultureSeptember 25, 2026

Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias are typically described at two levels: the accumulation of molecular pathology and the emergence of cognitive impairment. Understanding the relationship between pathology, often studied in animal models, and human cognition will require measurements spanning intermediate scales, including single neurons, neuronal populations, and distributed networks. Here we combine longitudinal measurements of behavior and neuronal population activity with fluid and hi

Society & CultureSeptember 22, 2026

Deconstruction of lysergic acid diethylamide.

Of the classic psychedelics, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is perhaps the best-known, but its complex chemical architecture has limited synthetic investigations aimed at generating analogues with improved safety and efficacy profiles. Here, we systematically deconstruct the tetracyclic ergoline core of LSD to create 9 simplified ergoline analogues (i.e., ergologs) and evaluate them in pharmacological assays relevant to 5-HT2A, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT2C receptor function. Our work revealed the key mo

Society & CultureSeptember 22, 2026

From past, persisting, and consolidating ecologies of segregation to ecologies of repair.

Across the United States and Europe, urban and periurban spaces have historically been shaped by land dispossession and enclosure that systematically exclude marginalized, non-White communities from the benefits of society, including access to nature. These dynamics, which have played out and perdured over centuries as part of historic land dispossession and recent green racial capitalism, form the bedrock of contemporary urban segregation and socioecological inequalities. As a result, we see th