Research

In the broadest terms, we are interested in how human information processing contributes to relevants social behavior, including but not restricted to criminally relevant behavior, sexual behavior, intergroup behavior, and political behavior.

Most of our research within the core field of social psychology tries to bridge cognitive processes and content of the individual with socially relevant issues. We are interested when and how people lump others in their social surrounding into "categories" and attach meaning to those by associating them with attributes ("stereotypes") or valence ("prejudice"). We also try to understand better, how people make sense of their nation's past, how they represent history and use this as a foil to better understand or navigate the presence. In the field of political psychology, a large part our research focuses on conspiracy beliefs or - more specifically - conspiracy mentality, a generalized worldview that assumes most events or phenomena to be casued by the direct design of a few powerful people plotting in secret.

Bridging social and legal psychology, we do research on sexual interest - whether it is normatively unproblematic (sexual interest in any gender of adults) or associated with problematic behavior (e.g., sexual interest in children or non-consensuality). How to measure it? How to conceptualize it theoretically? How to get a better understanding of the antecedents of different sexual interests?

Within the narrower field legal psychology, our main goal is to improve the methods and methodological standards of the field by mostly doing basic research on biases in expert witness assessment, ways to undo false memories or get a better estimate of the available evidence in the field via meta-analyses.

In all research fields we follow the ideal of an open, transparent and reproducible science by including the following aspects into our research process whenever possible:

  • pre-registered hypotheses and analysis plan
  • open data, open materials, open code
  • non-selective reporting of research studies and/ or programs