Max Planck Institutes and Experts

In prehistoric times, two distinct groups of hominins inhabited Eurasia: Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. We sequenced the genome of an approximately 90,000-year-old female individual from Russia and discovered that she had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. This shows that individuals from these two groups occasionally mixed. Together with previous evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans mixed with early modern humans, this shows that throughout history, humans from different groups have always mixed.

Researching learning processes of terrorist groups, we have discovered a logic of deradicalization: groups do not change their objectives but question the means and norms that define those objectives. However, when terrorist groups deradicalize, more radical factions splinter off. Such radicalization, in turn, leads to the radicalization of countermeasures by states. The learning processes of terrorist groups illuminate the logic of (de-)radicalization mechanisms and can be used to break co-radicalization patterns between states and non-state actors.

Focusing on the context of postwar Rome, this project explores the capacity of exhibitions to write the history of their time. With the exhibitionary concepts developed in postwar Rome I pick up on early, site-specific readings of the contemporary. These should provide alternatives to today’s one-sided understanding of the term as an effect of global economies.

How does the brain organize our experiences and our knowledge? A possible answer to this fundamental question: our brain’s navigation system forms so-called cognitive spaces in which we arrange our experience along feature dimensions, so that similar experiences are nearby in cognitive space. We propose this based on the combination of a wealth of findings about the functioning of place cells in the hippocampus and grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, which are central to spatial navigation. These cells also map cognitive spaces, thereby providing a spatial framework for human thinking.

Gender differences in the willingness to compete may contribute to differences in wages and career advancement of men and women. Policy interventions, such as quotas, come with unintended side-effects. Loukas Balafoutas, Helena Fornwagner and I have proposed priming subjects with power as an instrument to contain gender differences in the willingness to compete. We show that priming with high power closes the gender gap, in particular because it makes competition entry decisions more realistic and reduces the level of risk tolerance among male participants.