Peace

Citation: Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams, and Daniel Sznycer, for documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike.

If asked, most of us would say we want kind and trustworthy people as friends and don’t care for those who treat us poorly. There’s plenty of research to back that up. But Krems et al. noticed that much of that prior research looked specifically at person-to-person friendships in isolation, when in fact, we and our friends also interact regularly with plenty of other people. There’s a broader social context to be considered, in other words, and the authors decided to explore how that context might impact the qualities we look for in friends.

Over a thousand subjects from the US and India participated in six related studies designed to track people’s preferences for their friends’ behavior in various social circumstances. As expected, the subjects generally preferred friends with positive qualities when assessing how they wish said friends to behave toward them personally.

Wanting friends that are kind and trustworthy (as opposed to mean or indifferent) also held for neutral strangers, although people wanted their friends to be more “prosocial” toward themselves than others, especially if they were deemed best friends. But those dynamics shifted when it came to how people wanted their friends to behave toward their enemies. In those cases, some people preferred their friends to be more vicious towards those people in particular—but not to behave viciously more generally.

Soil science

Citation: Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri, and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and then digging them up after two months.

Yes, you read that right: 1,000 people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25 countries around the world.  Soil health is critical for agriculture and, by extension, food security, not to mention a healthy global ecosystem, but it has been declining worldwide, according to the authors. One key indicator is decomposition rates of complex organic matter. Commercially available teabags are a common material used to measure decomposition rates, known as the “teabag index” (TBI). However, Van der Heijden et al. felt the TBI could be improved upon.