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Understanding why individuals carry out behaviours that benefit others, especially genetically unrelated others, has been a major undertaking in many fields and particularly in biology. Here, we focus on the cooperation literature from natural populations and present the benefits of a social network approach in terms of how it can help to identify and understand factors that influence the maintenance and spread of cooperation, but are not easily captured when solely considering independent dyadic interactions. We describe how various routes to cooperation can be tested within the social network framework. Applying the social network approach to data from natural populations can help to uncover the evolutionary and ecological pressures that lead to differences in cooperation and other social processes.

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When forming opinions, people often rely on the behaviours and beliefs of others; this phenomenon has been understood by social psychologists as ‘social influence’. Online evaluations of goods provide a naturalistic context in which to investigate social influence. We collected information from 20,397 notes about 209 wines posted on a wine social networking site over the course of 10 years to examine the social influence on wine evaluations. Our analyses provide evidence for both normative and informational social influence on online wine evaluations. However, normative influence outweighs the effect of judgements made by experts. The influence of prior evaluations is strongest for the first few individuals who post their notes, and social influence increases as a function of source uniformity. Furthermore, expert members' evaluations are not more influential than other individuals' evaluations. Our results provide evidence for significant effects of social influence in an applied setting, impacting wine consumers that are exposed to the opinions of others, and have implications for how goods are advertised online. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

This article compares early nineteenth-century English and Scottish theories of the mind and the way that it develops to findings in today's developmental psychology and neuroscience through a close observation of the work of Elizabeth Hamilton (1756–1816). Hamilton was a Scottish writer and philosopher who produced three pedagogical works in her lifetime, consisting of her carefully formulated philosophy of mind and practical suggestions to caretakers and educators. Although Hamilton has received relatively little attention in modern philosophical literature, her understanding of the mind and the way it develops—based on her nuanced understanding of associationism and Scottish faculty psychology—is overwhelmingly supported by empirical findings today. In addition to utilizing Hamilton's work for the sake of understanding early nineteenth-century philosophy of mind, I argue that a large portion of Hamilton's work should be used to inform future research programs, early caregiving guides, and educational methods.