The COVID-19 pandemic presents a remarkable opportunity to put to work all of the research that has been undertaken in past decades on the elicitation and structural estimation of subjective belief distributions as well as preferences over atemporal risk, patience, and intertemporal risk. As contributors to elements of that research in laboratories and the field, we drew together those methods and applied them to an online, incentivized experiment in the United States. We have two major findings. First, the atemporal risk premium during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to change significantly compared to before the pandemic, consistent with theoretical results of the effect of increased background risk on foreground risk attitudes. Second, subjective beliefs about the cumulative level of deaths evolved dramatically over the period between May and November 2020, a volatile one in terms of the background evolution of the pandemic.

We convey our experiences developing and implementing an online experiment to elicit subjective beliefs and economic preferences. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated closures of our laboratories required us to conduct an online experiment in order to collect beliefs and preferences associated with the pandemic in a timely manner. Since we had not previously conducted a similar multi-wave online experiment, we faced design and implementation considerations that are not present when running a typical laboratory experiment. By discussing these details more fully, we hope to contribute to the online experiment methodology literature at a time when many other researchers may be considering conducting an online experiment for the first time. We focus primarily on methodology; in a complementary study we focus on initial research findings.

Heintz & Scott-Phillips's hypothesis that the topic range and type diversity of human expressive communication gains support from consilience with prior accounts of market exchange as fundamental to unique human niche construction, and of mindshaping as much more important than mindreading. The productivity of the idea is illustrated by the light it might shed on why elephants seem to engage in continuous social communication for little evident purpose.

The most plausible of Yarkoni's paths to recovery for psychology is the least radical one: psychologists need truly quantitative methods that exploit the informational power of variance and heterogeneity in multiple variables. If they drop ambitions to explain entire behaviors, they could find a box full of design and econometric tools in the parts of experimental economics that don't ape psychology.

Ainslie insightfully refines the concept of willpower by emphasizing low-effort applications of resolve. However, he gives undue weight to intertemporal discounting as the problem that willpower is needed to overcome. Nonhumans typically don't encounter choices that differ only in the time of consumption. Humans learn to transform uncertainty into problems they can solve using culturally evolved mechanisms for quantifying risk.

Leider and Griffiths clarify the basis for unification between mechanism-driven and solution-driven disciplines and methodologies in cognitive science. But, two outstanding issues arise for their model of resource-rationality: human brains co-process information with their environments, rather than merely adapt to them; and this is expressed in methodological differences between disciplines that complicate Leider and Griffiths’ proposed structural unification.

Use of network models to identify causal structure typically blocks reduction across the sciences. Entanglement of mental processes with environmental and intentional relationships, as Borsboom et al. argue, makes reduction of psychology to neuroscience particularly implausible. However, in psychiatry, a mental disorder can involve no brain disorder at all, even when the former crucially depends on aspects of brain structure. Gambling addiction constitutes an example.

Evidence for an EEA-derived domain-specific inference system must point to an active, latent representational structure. Otherwise we need to hypothesize only passive, virtual belief not over-ridden on the basis of the individual's experience. The folk economic beliefs identified by Boyer & Petersen (B&P), being with one exception about macroeconomics, might be virtual beliefs that people extrapolate across the micro–macro scale shift based on their experiences with markets.

Stanford casts original light on the question of why humans moralize some preferences. However, his account leaves some ambiguity around the relationship between the evolutionary function of moralization and the dynamics of tribal formation. Does the model govern these dynamics, or only explain why there are moralizing dispositions that more conventional modeling of the dynamics can exploit?

Gowdy & Krall (G&K) essentially recapitulate Malthus's classic argument for ecological pessimism in modern biological dress. Their reasoning also reproduces Malthus's blindness to the implications of technological innovation. Agriculture might have suppressed human individualism as G&K insist, but technology has tended to foster it. This complicates human ecological prospects in a non-Malthusian way, and it might additionally provide the resources for deliverance from disaster.

A consensus conference on the reasons for the undertreatment of depression was organized by the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association (NDMDA) on January 17–18,1996. The target audience included health policymakers, clinicians, patients and their families, and the public at large. Six key questions were addressed: (1) Is depression undertreated in the community and in the clinic? (2) What is the economic cost to society of depression? (3) What have been the efforts in the past to redress undertreatment and how successful have they been? (4) What are the reasons for the gap between our knowledge of the diagnosis and treatment of depression and actual treatment received in this country? (5) What can we do to narrow this gap? (6) What can we do immediately to narrow this gap?

Bentley et al. say that economics is the science of their map's northwest quadrant, where choice is individual and transparent. This accepts the picture of the discipline common among behavioral economists who aim to drag economics southward but not eastward. In fact, leading economics journals regularly publish models located in all four quadrants, and the prominence of work from the eastern zone is increasing.

Classical probability models of incentive response are inadequate in “large worlds,” where the dimensions of relative risk and the dimensions of similarity in outcome comparisons typically differ. Quantum probability models for choice in large worlds may be motivated pragmatically – there is no third theory – or metaphysically: statistical processing in the brain adapts to the true scale-relative structure of the universe.

Clark expresses reservations about Friston's reductive interpretation of action-oriented predictive processing (AOPP) models of cognition, but he doesn't link these reservations to specific alternatives. Neuroeconomic models of sub-cognitive reward valuation, which, like AOPP, integrate attention with action based on prediction error, are such an alternative. They interpret reward valuation as an input to neocortical processing instead of reducing it.

McCullough et al. recognize that revenge and forgiveness jointly constitute a functional strategic complex. However, they model the halves of the complex as outputs of modules selected for regulating dyadic relationships. This is backwards. Forgiveness is a culturally evolved institution that can be exapted for use in dyadic contexts; it would be cheap talk among dyads were it not for the shadow of society.

Guala notes that low-cost punishment is the main mechanism that deters free-riding in small human communities. This mechanism is complemented by unusual human vulnerability to gossip. Defenders of an evolutionary discontinuity supporting human sociality might seize on this as an alternative to enjoyment of moralistic aggression as a special adaptation. However, the more basic adaptation of language likely suffices.