Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Richard Wagner ist der Komponist, über den die deutsche Gesellschaft bis heute nicht zur Ruhe gekommen ist. Nach Wagners Tod holte sie sich den Vergangenen in ihre Gegenwart zurück. Denn Wagner konnte beinahe allen alles verheißen. Sven Oliver Müller erzählt in diesem Buch die aufregende Geschichte des Wagner-Mythos zwischen Verklärung und Verdammung, zwischen Hass und Hingabe ...

Swine flu, the bank crisis, BSE, Fukushima: The only thing we can be certain of is that we live in a world of uncertainty and risk. For psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, these scares and the public reaction to them describe our irrational way of dealing with risks. Gigerenzer gives the reader the lowdown on how the psychology of risk works. Much of the problem is caused by confusing statistics and probabilities that are so readily propagated by experts and the media. One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is ...

Feelings are not only transitory per se; they are also transitory in the historical sense. There are feelings – take Honor for example – that have nowadays become largely foreign to us, but which held significance for our grandparents and great grandparents.  ...

With the goal of better medicine, Gerd Gigerenzer and J. A. Muir Gray deal with the fundamental problem that many doctors as well as most patients do not properly understand the relevant information regarding therapies and diagnostics. That this lack of understanding is fatal can be seen in the waste of enormous amounts of money as well as in the frequent failure of disease treatments ...

Simple Heuristics in a Social World invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant ...

What does the newborn child perceive? How do children learn to deal with their emotions? When and how does personality develop? How do cognitive abilities change in adulthood and old age? – The topics within developmental psychology are perhaps more diverse and engaging than in any other field of psychology. "Entwicklungspsychologie" or "Developmental Psychology" ...

Young, middle-aged, and older raters (N=154) evaluated 1,026 prototypical facial poses of neutrality, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness stemming from 171 young, middle-aged, and older posers. …