Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Study on the impact of different risk communication formats on the vaccine intentions of 1255 unvaccinated, vaccine-hesitant adults in Germany

Study on the effectiveness of restrictions takes citizens’ behavioral changes into account

Study reveals how people resolve dilemmas in online content moderation

This result puts Max Planck in second place in a Europe-wide comparison

Anastasia Kozyreva on strategies that help us gain more control over the way we use online media

According to traditional dogma, political decisions should be rational and sensible. Under no circumstances should they be emotional. However, the reality has always looked somewhat different. What importance did feelings have for political events?

We are increasingly encountering artificial intelligence (AI) in our everyday lives, from bots in call centers and robotic colleagues on assembly lines, to electronically controlled players in computer games. At the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Iyad Rahwan and his team are investigating how people behave when they interact with intelligent machines and what they expect from their artificial counterparts.

Nowadays, political debates often turn into verbal brawls – especially on social media. In order to counteract this, Eckehard Olbrich and Sven Banisch of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development are investigating how polarization occurs and how opinion formation in groups works.

For humans, plants are a source of food, building material, and medicine. But not everything that green is good. Some plants produce toxins that can make us sick or even kill us. Thus, a wariness of plants makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, especially for infants and toddlers. Annie Wertz from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin is investigating which behaviors protect children from dangerous plants and how they learn from adults which plants are safe to eat.

Receiving a cancer diagnosis is always a shock. There is probably no other physical illness that has such a severe psychological impact on the person concerned. For a long time, researchers sought to find the cause of the disease in the personalities of the patients themselves. This was a fatal mistake, as our author shows on the basis of how the issue was treated in the past.

Machines powered by artificial intelligence take on ever more social roles. To study this new class of actors, their behavioral patterns, and ecology, Researchers of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin describe Machine Behavior—an emerging approach that applies concepts and methodologies from across the behavioral sciences to intelligent machines. They review available empirical evidence on how machine behavior can corrupt human morals and evaluate the risks of AI agents acting as bad role models and AI advisors.

It is essential to carefully plan a scientific study to maximize the chance of its success. The planning phase typically includes considerations of statistical power, which is the probability that the study will show a hypothesized effect if it exists. Often, sample size is considered as the primary parameter. Particularly in longitudinal studies, however, there are numerous other parameters, such as the number of measurements and their distribution over time, which have a significant impact on the success and also the budget of a study.

Consumers need independent health information to evaluate health care services. Fast-and-frugal decision trees can reduce complexity and help consumers identify useful health information. Together with experts and laypeople and based on machine learning methods, we developed a fast-and-frugal tree that warns consumers about unreliable health information. Integrated learning methods, we developed a fast-and-frugal tree that warns consumers about unreliable health information. Integrated into the RisikoKompass-App (RiskCompass-App), the decision tree enhances consumer’s risk literacy.

Some assumptions are so widely shared that they are rarely questioned. One such assumption is that positive emotions increase chances of beating cancer. Although researchers have yet to establish a clear link, this assumption continues to define society’s view of cancer. Even in the twentieth century, guides for doctors advised them against revealing a diagnosis of cancer to their patients in the belief that feelings of fear might negatively influence the recovery process. How did these assumptions gain broad acceptance? This text looks at the history of how emotions can influence cancer.

People differ widely in their willingness to take risks. Moreover, an individual’s propensity for risk taking can vary across domains. But new research shows that – akin to the general factor of intelligence – there appears to be a general factor of risk preference, which remains relatively stable over time. Importantly, this factor cannot be assessed by conventional behavioral tests, which often yield contradictory results. The new findings cast light on the nature of human risk-taking propensity.