Max Planck Institute for Human Development

What can a history of trust reveal about history at large? From a history of emotions perspective, trust has undergone a remarkable shift of meaning in the past two centuries. …

Based on the finding that a contemporary school reform without democracy educational foundation is unthinkable and democracy education is also a challenge for current school development, the contributions gathered here by Wolfgang Edelstein bundle the various facets of this relationship ...

In life, risk is reward and vice versa. Unfortunately, the big rewards people desire are relatively unlikely to occur. This relationship between risk and reward or probabilities and payoffs seems obvious to the financial community and to laypeople alike. Yet theories of decision making have largely ignored it. We conducted an ecological analysis of life’s gambles, ranging from …

Human cognitive aging differs between and is malleable within individuals. In the absence of a strong genetic program, it is open to a host of hazards, such as vascular conditions, metabolic syndrome, and chronic stress, but also open to protective and enhancing factors, such as experience-dependent cognitive plasticity …

We investigated lexical decision making in children and adults by analyzing spatiotemporal characteristics of responses involving a hand movement. Children’s and adults’ movement trajectories were assessed in three tasks: a lexical decision task (LDT), a pointing task that involved minimal cognitive processing, and a symbol task requiring a simple binary decision.

The year 2013 was of great significance for the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. The Institute celebrated its 50th anniversary. One man holds a special place in the Institute’s history: Founding director Hellmut Becker, was born 100 years ago, on 17 May 1913. To mark the Institute’s anniversary celebrations in autumn 2013, an exhibition (in German) commemorated the life and work of Hellmut Becker. …

Shark attack fatalities double from 2010, women still earn less than men, genetically modified corn is carcinogenic, eating chocolate makes you thin, Poles work harder than Germans: Headlines like these circulate almost daily in the media, where the competition for attention is tough. …

People smile in various emotional contexts, for example, when they are amused or angry or simply being polite. We investigated whether younger and older adults differ in how well they are able to identify the emotional experiences accompanying smile expressions, and whether the age of the smiling person plays a role in this respect. …

Why should historians concern themselves with the audience and their music? Because the audience’s behaviour, while based on supposedly trivial details, reveals extensive social developments. This book demonstrates that musical culture provides plenty for historiography to explore. It reveals, through the types of opera and concert halls in Berlin, London, and Vienna …

In the age of Big Data we often believe that our predictions about the future are better than ever before. But as risk expert Gerd Gigerenzer shows, the surprising truth is that in the real world, we often get better results by using simple rules and considering less information. ...