Recent news from our lab
Open Science Awards for Lab Members (11/2024)
The exPer lab is proud to report that, for the seventh year running, several of our lab members - Alicia Seidl, Luisa Horsten, David Scholz, and Benjamin Hilbig - recently received the Open Science Award (in 'Gold') of the Landau Psychology Department. We are determined to foster the principles of Open Science and will continue to strive for transparency and reproducability in our research.Past news from our lab
Welcome to Our New Team Members (02/2024)
The exPer lab is happy to welcome Moritz Pischel and Vanessa Pallentin as new team members. Moritz joined in October 2023 as a PhD student and member of the SMiP graduate school. Vanessa joined in February 2024, filling in for assistant professor Meike Kroneisen (who is on leave). We also welcome the student assistants who have joined recently or are about to join our lab: Julian Nawrocki, Nils Steiger, Sina Niederau, and Nele Jaworski. Welcome, everyone!
Open Science Awards for Lab Members (11/2023)
The exPer lab is proud to report that, for the sixth year running, several of our lab members - Luisa Horsten, David Scholz, and Benjamin Hilbig - recently received the Open Science Award (in 'Gold') of the Landau Psychology Department. We are determined to foster the principles of Open Science and will continue to strive for transparency and reproducability in our research.
Teaching Awards for our lab members (07/2023)
We are proud honored and to receive awards for excellent teaching. This year, one award goes to Michael Kriechbaumer for his lab class (Empirisches Praktikum) and another to our former lab member Isabel Thielmann for the masters seminar "Web-based research". As always, thanks to the students for their positive assessments and feedback. We will, of course, continue to strive for excellence in teaching.
Ph.D. for Luisa Horsten (05/2023)
The Experimental Psychology & Personality Lab is happy to announce that our team member Luisa Horsten successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis. In her publication-based thesis, Luisa dissociates contructs that have been considered viable representations of the common core of socially and ethically aversive personality traits. The Lab congratulates Luisa and welcomes her in her new role as post-doc.
Grant from the German Research Foundation (03/2023)
Together with colleagues at the University of Trier and the University of Mannheim, our lab member Jun.-Prof. Dr. Meike Kroneisen has received a 3-year grant from the German Research Foundation to investiagte proximate explanations underlying the animacy effect in episodic memory.
Lab Renamed (02/2023)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab has changed its official name to the Experimental Psychology & Personality Lab to better reflect our primary areas of interest in research and the breadth of our teaching.
Open Science Awards for Lab Members (11/2022)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to report that, for the fifth year running, several of our lab members - Benjamin Hilbig, Luisa Horsten, and David Scholz - recently received the Open Science Award of the Landau Psychology Department. We are determined to foster the principles of Open Science and will continue to strive for transparency and reproducability in our research.
Psychonomic Society Best Article Award 2022 (09/2022)
This year's Psychonomic Society Best Article Award in Behavior Research Methods goes to the paper "lab. js: A free, open, online study builder" and corresponding software which was developed in large part at our lab. Congrats to our former lab member and PhD student Felix Henninger all co-athors (Yury Shevchenko, Ulf K. Mertens, Pascal J. Kieslich, and Benjamin E. Hilbig).
New Grant from the German Research Foundation (03/2022)
Benjamin Hilbig has received a 2-year grant from the German Research Foundation. The project entitled “Honesty beyond borders? A cross-national study of the interplay between personality and societal norms” tests whether and how the link between personality and dishonesty depends on the cross-societal variation in the typical extent of honesty and thus societal norms.
Open Science Awards for Lab Members (12/2021)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to report that, for the fourth year running, several of our lab members - Benjamin Hilbig, Luisa Horsten, Meike Kroneisen, and Isa Thielmann - recently received the Open Science Award of the Landau Psychology Department. We are determined to foster the principles of Open Science and will continue to strive for transparency and reproducability in our research.
Teaching Awards for Cognition Lab (11/2021)
For the very first time, students at our department have announced awards for outstanding digital teaching. We are proud to receive two such awards - one for the project seminar "Web-based programming" by Isabel Thielmann and one for the lecture "Learning and Memory" by Benjamin Hilbig. We are grateful to the students for their positive assessments and feedback and will continue to strive for excellence in teaching - be it digital or in-person.
New Grant from the German Research Foundation (09/2021)
Isabel Thielmann has received a 3-year grant from the German Research Foundation. The project entitled “The core tendencies underlying individual differences in prosocial behavior” aims at identifying the shared, underlying dispositional cores of conceptually related traits that can account for individual variation in different prosocial behaviors, such as helping, cooperation, and reciprocity. Thereby, the project will provide a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of which personality traits affect prosocial behavior in which classes of situations, thus offering a strong theoretical basis for future research on individual differences in prosocial behavior.
Morton Deutsch Award for Mathias Twardawski and Benjamin Hilbig (08/2021)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to report that Mathias Twardawski (former PhD student in our lab) and Benjamin Hilbig have received the 2020 Morton Deutsch Award of the International Society for Justice Research for their publication "Is it all about retribution? The flexibility of punishment goals" (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-020-00352-x). The award is given annually for the best article published in Social Justice Research and named after one of the society’s most prolific and influential contributors, Morton Deutsch.
Teaching Awards for Cognition Lab (07/2021)
For the seventh year running, we are proud to receive awards for excellent teaching. This year, both awards go to Isabel Thielmann - once again for her lab class (Empirisches Praktikum) and for the project seminar "Web-based programming". As always, thanks to the students for their positive assessments and feedback. We will, of course, continue to strive for excellence in teaching.
Isabel Thielmann named 2020 APS Rising Star (03/2021)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to announce that our lab member Isabel Thielmann has been recognized as 2020 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). The award honors young scholars in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions. We congratulate Isabel on this outstanding achievement!
Walter G. Klopfer Award for Isabel Thielmann and Benjamin Hilbig (01/2021)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to report that our lab members Isabel Thielmann and Benjamin Hilbig have won the 2020 Walter G. Klopfer Award for their publication "The HEXACO–100 across 16 languages: A large-scale test of measurement invariance". The award honors the best empirical paper published in the Journal of Personality Assessment in 2020. We congratulate Isabel and Benjamin on this achievement!
Open Science Awards for Lab Members (12/2020)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to report that, for the third year running, the majority of our lab members - Felix Henninger, Benjamin Hilbig, Luisa Horsten, Meike Kroneisen, and Isa Thielmann - recently received the Open Science Award in Gold of the Landau Psychology Department. We are determined to foster the principles of Open Science and will continue to strive for transparency and reproducability in our research.
New Grant from the German Research Foundation (11/2020)
Together with our former team member and PhD student, Sina A. Klein, who is now a post-doc at the Univeristy of Heidelberg, Benjamin Hilbig has received a new 3-year grant from the German Research Foundation. The project entitled “Conflict of cooperation and pro-environmental behavior: Social and temporal determinants of choice behavior” investigates situations in which cooperative behavior might benefit the members of one's in-group but be detrimental for the environment, thus posing negative externalities on a larger scale. The goal is to explain choice behavior in such situations, including its social and temporal determinants, through the lens of a cognitive framework focusing on effects of salience on decision making.
Teaching Awards for Cognition Lab (07/2020)
For the sixth year running, we are proud to receive awards for excellent teaching. This year, both awards go to Benjamin Hilbig - once again for his lectures “Learning & Memory” and "Thinking, Decision Making, & Language". As always, thanks to the students for their positive assessments and feedback. We will, of course, continue to strive for excellence in teaching.
EAPP Early Achievement Award 2020 (06/2020)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to announce that our lab member Isabel Thielmann has won the 2020 Early Achievement Award of the European Association of Personality Psychology. The award honors young scholars whose extraordinary early achievements in personality psychology have already made a significant contribution to the field. We congratulate Isabel on this outstanding achievement!
Open Science Knowledge Base (04/2020)
Two members of our lab, Luisa Horsten and Felix Henninger, have received a commendation from the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science for their work on the Open Science Knowledge Base. This comprehensive online resource curates information and best practices around open science. It was developed and vastly extended by our colleagues following its initiation by the department's Open Science Commission. Luisa and Felix are now working with the Center for Open Science to build a larger, community-driven learning portal.
Best Paper Award for Felix Henninger (02/2020)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is happy to report that a project that originated in our lab, the lab.js experiment builder, has been awarded the German Society for Online Research's annual best paper award. lab.js is an free, open-source experiment builder that makes it easy to construct experiments for both online and in-laboratory use, and which we have used extensively in our own research and teaching.
Personality and Prosocial Behavior (12/2019)
A paper authored by our lab member Dr. Isabel Thielmann has recently been published in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin. It develops an integrative theoretical framework for understanding individual differences in prosocial behavior and tests this framework in a comprehensive meta-analysis of the relation between 51 personality traits and prosocial behavior in the six most commonly applied economic games. The Cognitive Psychology Lab congratulates Isabel on this achievement. The postprint of the paper can be downloaded here.
Open Science Awards (11/2019)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to report that, for the second year running, the majority of our lab members - Felix Henninger, Benjamin Hilbig, Luisa Horsten, Sina Klein, Meike Kroneisen, and Isa Thielmann - recently received the Open Science Award of the Landau Psychology Department. We are determined to foster the principles of Open Science and will continue to strive for transparency and reproducability in our research.
Welcome to Our New Team Members (10/2019)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is happy to welcome Lena Steindorf and Kotryna Stupnianek as new team members who joined our ranks as junior researchers and teaching assistants. Lena - who is also a member of the Cognition and Attention Regulation Lab at the University of Heidelberg - is currently working on her Ph.D. on mind wandering. Kotryna - who is also a member of the Personality, Psychological Assessment, and Psychological Methods Lab at the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau - is currently doing her Ph.D. on how just world beliefs relate to corrupt behavior. Welcome, Lena and Kotryna!
Ph.D. for Sina Klein (08/2019)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is happy to announce that our team member Sina Klein successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis with the title “For the Greater Good – A Dissection and Empirical Investigation of Pro-Environmental Behavior and Cooperation”. In her thesis, Sina investigates how people decide in situations in which pro-environmental behavior and cooperation with one’s own group are in conflict with each other and how these decisions can be influenced. The Cognitive Psychology Lab congratulates Sina and wishes her all the best for the future.
Teaching Awards for Cognition Lab (07/2019)
For the fifth year running, members of our lab have received awards for excellent teaching. Isabel Thielmann and Meike Kroneisen received the award for their lab classes (Empirisches Praktikum) and Benjamin Hilbig received the award for his lecture “Learning & Memory”. Congratulations to Isa, Meike and Benjamin and thanks to the students for their positive assessments and feedback. We will, of course, continue to strive for excellence in teaching.
International Media Attention (01/2019)
Recent research on ‘The Dark Core of Personality’, co-authored by Benjamin Hilbig, has gained wide attention in the international media. Close to a hundred media outlets worldwide with a reach of several hundred million readers and listeners reported on the findings or interviewed the researchers. More information on the research itself and the media coverage can be found at darkfactor.org
Open Science Awards (11/2018)
We are proud to report that the majority of our lab members - Felix Henninger, Benjamin Hilbig, Sina Klein, Meike Kroneisen, and Isa Thielmann - recently received the Open Science Award of the Landau Psychology Department. We are determined to foster the principles of Open Science and will continue to strive for transparency and reproducability in research.
Welcome to our new team members (10/2018)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab welcomes its new Ph.D. students / junior researchers Luisa Horsten (DFG Graduate School "Statistical Modeling in Psychology"), Michael Kriechbaumer (DFG project "Experimental examination of proximate explanations underlying the survival processing effect in episodic memory" headed by Prof. Meike Kroneisen), and Felix Ludwig. We are also thrilled to welcome our new student assistants Sarah Arnemann, Maja Stoverock, Maximilian Tantik, and Vanessa Wiench.
Charlotte- and Karl-Bühler Award (09/2018)
Our team member Benjamin Hilbig has received the Charlotte- and Karl-Bühler Award from the German Psychological Society (DGPs). The award is given every two years to mid-career scholars whose work has reached the level of a research program that has influenced a subfield within psychology and potentially spilled over to neighbouring disciplines. The full press release can be found here and laudation here.
Teaching Awards for Cognition Lab (08/2018)
For the fourth year running, members of our lab have received awards for excellent teaching. We are particularly pleased to announce that, for the first time, the Master's level course "Programming Web-Based Studies" and the seminar "Cognitive Illusions" - both taught by Isa Thielmann - received an award. Another two awards go to Benjamin Hilbig - once again for both of his lectures “Learning & Memory” and "Thinking, Decision Making, & Language". Congratulations to Isa and Benjamin and thanks to the students for their positive assessments and feedback. We will, of course, continue to strive for excellence in teaching.
Fellowship from the Wikimedia/Volkswagenstiftung/ Stifterverband (07/2018)
Felix Henninger is joining Wikimedia Germany's Open Science Fellows Programme, and will, over the course of the next year, be working to make open science practices more common. His focus is the construction of research tools and educational materials to facilitate and encourage the open sharing of research materials and resources.
New Grant from the German Research Foundation (04/2018)
Jun.-Prof. Meike Kroneisen has received a 3-year grant from the German Research Foundation. In research on the survival processing effect, ultimate explanations have dominated the scientific arena so far. According to these explanations humans easily remember information previously evaluated with respect to its survival relevance because this memorial skill facilitates adaptive behaviors that help them survive. The project entitled “Experimental examination of proximate explanations underlying the survival processing effect in episodic memory” aims to investigate the episodic memory processes underlying the effect to provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the survival processing effect.
The dark core of personality: D (03/2018)
A paper co-authored by our lab member Prof. Benjamin Hilbig has recently been accepted for publication in the prestigious journal Psychological Review. It develops a unifying, comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding dark personality in terms of a fluid, general dispositional tendency: the Dark Factor of Personality, or simply D. The Cognitive Psychology Lab congratulates Benjamin on this achievement. For more information on D and to download a preprint go to darkfactor.org
Ph.D. Scholarships at the Research Training Group "Statistical Modeling in Psychology" (03/2018)
The Research Training Group “Statistical Modeling in Psychology” (SMiP) funded by the German Research Foundation, is seeking to hire PhD students. SMiP is a transregional collaboration of researchers from Freiburg, Heidelberg, Landau, Mannheim, and Tübingen, working to overcome the gap between substantive research in basic and applied fields of psychology and latest developments in statistical modeling and psychometrics. For more information and application procedures, please visit smip.uni-mannheim.de. The closing date for applications is April 30th 2018.
Research Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (09/2017)
Dr. Isabel Thielmann has received a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation for a half-year research stay at the Amsterdam Cooperation Lab headed by Prof. Daniel Balliet. The project entitled “Personality traits and prosocial behavior in economic games: A meta-analysis” aims to provide a comprehensive, meta-analytic summary of evidence relating personality traits to prosocial behaviors in economic games. Overall, the objective of the project thus is to foster an enhanced understanding of different types of prosocial behavior, to bring forth personality theory in the prosocial domain, and to set a stage for future research on human prosociality.
Teaching awards for Cognition Lab (07/2017)
We are honored to announce that, for the third year running, our lab has received awards for excellent teaching. This time around, all three lectures held by our team members in the past year - "Motivation & Emotion" by Meike Kroneisen and “Learning & memory” as well as "Thinking & language" by Benjamin Hilbig - were awarded. Our thanks go to the students for their positive assessments and feedback. We will, of course, continue to strive for excellence in teaching.
Research Training Group “Statistical Modeling in Psychology” (05/2017)
The German Research Foundation has funded the Research Training Group “Statistical Modeling in Psychology”, a transregional collaboration of researchers from Freiburg, Heidelberg, Landau, Mannheim, and Tübingen. The group aims to overcome the gap between substantive research in basic and applied fields of psychology and latest developments in statistical modeling and psychometrics. For more information, please visit http://smip.uni-mannheim.de.
New Grant from the German Research Foundation (03/2017)
Prof. Benjamin Hilbig and Dr. Isabel Thielmann have received a 2-year grant from the German Research Foundation. The project entitled “Bringing angels and demons down to earth: Real-life generality and mechanisms of the link between personality and ethical behavior” continues an earlier grant from the German Research Foundation to B. Hilbig and I. Zettler. It aims at providing a thorough understanding of the boundary conditions and mechanisms of personality factors driving unethical behavior. Thus, the project bridges different lines of research on basic personality traits (specifically the HEXACO model) and behavioral ethics.
New edition of "Allgemeine Psychologie" (01/2017)
A brand-new edition of the most comprehensive German textbook on all areas of cognitive/experimental psychology has just been published. We are particularly thrilled to report that it includes a whole new chapter on judgment and decision making that is co-authored by our lab member Benjamin Hilbig. For more information on the book please visit the publisher's homepage.
Information on teaching updated (08/2016)
We have updated all information on courses taught, exam regulations, and Hiwi-Jobs and internships. Please visit our teaching page.
Teaching awards for Cognition Lab members (07/2016)
We are proud to announce that our team members Isabel Thielmann and Benjamin Hilbig have received awards for excellent teaching in the academic year 2015/2016. Isabel received the award for her lab class (Empirisches Praktikum) on personality judgments. Benjamin received the award for his lecture “Learing & memory” (Allgemeine Psychologie I – Lernen, Gedächtnis und Wissen). Our thanks go to the students for their positive assessment and feedback. And congratulations to Isabel and Benjamin!
Ph. D. for Isabel Thielmann (12/2015)
Recently, our team member Isabel Thielmann successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim. In her publication-based thesis entitled “Trust from a Trait Perspective: A Theoretical Framework and Empirical Test” Isabel investigates the personality determinants underlying trust and trustworthy behavior, particularly focusing on the HEXACO model of personality and the Honesty-Humility factor. The Cognitive Psychology Lab congratulates Isabel and is thrilled that she will stay on board as a post-doctoral researcher.
Castellan Award for Felix Henninger (12/2015)
We are proud to announce that our colleague Felix Henninger, together with Pascal Kieslich from the University of Mannheim, has been awarded the Castellan Award for Best Student Paper for the working paper "A Flexible, Cross-Plattform, Open Framework for Interactive Experiments" at the annual meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology (SCiP) in Chicago.Their paper introduces a general mechanism for implementing interactive studies, that is, any form of study in which participants’ experiences depend not only on their own responses, but also on those of other participants who complete the same study in parallel. The software thus especially serves the rapidly growing field of strategic interaction research within psychology and behavioral economics.
The novel contribution is that Pascal and Felix integrate the interactive component into general-purpose experimental software that is used in, for example, cognitive psychology. This gives researchers heretofore unknown flexibility in constructing studies, especially with regard to combinations of methods from the respective fields.
We have been using the package continuously in our research for several years, and are happy that it is now available to fellow researchers as open-source software. Please find downloads, source code, and further documentation at https://github.com/psynteract/.
Welcome to Our New Team Members! (10/2015)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab is happy to announce Meike Kroneisen, Jens Bender, and Mathias Twardawski as new team members. Meike received her Ph.D. at the University of Mannheim where she was recently a post-doctoral researcher. She is joining us as an Assistant Professor for Experimental Psychology. Her primary research focus is on human memory, with particular emphasis on whether our memory is adaptive or not. Jens - who is also a member of the Institute for Communication and Media Psychology at the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau - has joined our ranks as a teaching assistant and researcher in the area of moral behavior and motivated information processing. Mathias recently completed his Master's degree in Social and Cognitive Psychology at the University of Mannheim. This winter semester he joins the Graduate School “Learning and Teaching Processes” - and our lab - as a Ph.D. student.Welcome to our lab, Meike, Jens, and Mathias!
Reproducibility of Psychological Science (09/2015)
Over the last 4 years, the Open Science Collaboration has conducted a large-scale project to assess the reproducibility of psychological findings, using a sample of articles from major journals. The Cognitive Psychology Lab is proud to say that our team member, Felix Henninger, has been a part of this collaboration, and is a co-author of the report now published in the journal Science.Reproducibility is a core feature of science — any claims should be independently verifiable and validated. In practice, however, this step is rarely taken, and accordingly it is unknown how many studies could be reproduced. To estimate the extent of reproducibility in current psychological science, the Open Science Collaboration, a group of 270 researchers worldwide, led by Brian Nosek and the Center for Open Science, has completed high-quality, fully transparent, direct replications of 100 studies from three major psychological journals. Of the studies so performed, the authors judged 39 to be very similar to the original results. Overall, effect sizes were reduced by half, as compared to the initial reports.
The now-published report concludes that „[t]he present results suggest that there is room to improve reproducibility in psychology. Any temptation to interpret these results as a defeat for psychology, or science more generally, must contend with the fact that this project demonstrates science behaving as it should.“ It has received extensive press coverage, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Spiegel Online, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Deutschlandfunk.
New Grant from the German Research Foundation (06/2015)
Prof. Benjamin Hilbig and Isabel Thielmann have received a 3-year grant from the German Research Foundation. The project entitled “Antagonistic personality trait patterns and cooperative behavior: A multi-component approach” aims at providing a thorough understanding of the nuances of (non-)cooperative behavior in different antagonistic trait patterns (i.e., antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, and paranoid personality patterns). Thus, the project links different lines of research on basic personality traits (specifically the HEXACO model), cooperation, and personality accentuations/disorders.
Cognition Research Panel launched (05/2015)
The Cognitive Psychology Lab has launched a new research panel which will enable all who are intersted in participating in studies and experiments (both via the Internet and in the lab) to register and receive corresponding invitations. The studies and experiments are usually interesting and provide monetary incentives (or, at least, course credit). Registration in the panel is completely free, there is no obligation to participate in any studies/experiments, and registration can be revoced at any time. Sign up now be part of the Cognitive Psychology Lab research panel.