Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Humiliation practices are common, for example, in parenting and education, on the internet, in penal law, and in politics. Thus, after 1944, many French women accused of liaising with Germans were degraded by having their hair shorn in public.
Die Politik der Demütigung investigates humiliation as an instrument of power in public settings over the past 250 years, demonstrating that modernity never relinquished the pillory but simply reinvented it. It is no longer the state that shames and humiliates but society.

Adaptive learning systems need to meet two complementary and partially conflicting goals: detecting regularities in the world versus remembering specific events. The hippocampus (HC) keeps a fine balance between computations that extract commonalities of incoming information (i.e., pattern completion) and computations that enable encoding of highly similar events into unique representations (i.e., pattern separation).

Many worry about the recent rise of right-wing populism and extremism in Germany. Many worry about the recent rise of right-wing populism and extremism in Germany. Racism against foreigners and refugees has reached new levels. Emotions like fear, hatred or anger obviously play a major role in this development. Uffa Jensen explores the role of such emotions in prejudices by discussing the modern history of anti-Semitism, islamophobia, and racism.

Social learning is a fundamental element of human cognition. Learning from others facilitates the transmission of information that helps individuals and groups rapidly adjust to new environments and underlies adaptive cultural evolution. While basic human propensities for social learning are traditionally assumed to be species-universal recent empirical studies show that they vary between individuals and populations. Yet the causes of this variation remain poorly understood. Here we show that interdependence in everyday social and economic activities can strongly amplify social learning.

Psychological heuristics are formal models for making decisions that are easy to understand, apply and explain. This article presents the conditions under which psychological heuristics perform on par with or even better than more complex standard models and discusses the role that psychological heuristics can play in theory and practice of operational research (OR).

In this study, we looked at masked morphological priming effects in German children and adults beyond mean response times by taking into account response time distributions. We conducted an experiment comparing suffixed word primes (kleidchen-KLEID), suffixed nonword primes (kleidtum-KLEID), nonsuffixed nonword primes (kleidekt-KLEID) ...