Context: Human behavior

In my graduate curriculum at the University of Cologne, I majored in Social Psychology. I learned how to apply the methods of empirical research: designing questionnaires, conducting interviews, conducting research experiments, compiling data with SPSS, assessing data with statistical analysis, and writing reports according to the APA guide.

Prior to writing my thesis about trust decisions, I covered the following topics more detail:

• Behavioral finance and other psychological concepts related to financial topics (debt, transition to the EURO currency, Prospect theory, investment decisions).
• Cognitive heuristics, and the psychology of making decisions. My focus was on the role of emotions in decision-making; in particular on the paper Risk as Feelings, by Loewenstein et al..
• Evolutionary psychology with a focus was on altruism, cooperation, and the concept of biological markets.
• In a research experiment with 270 students, I investigated the roots of prosocial behavior. My focus was on moral identity traits, based on The Self-Importance of Moral Identity, by Aquino and Reed II.
• Concepts involved in negotiating and strategic cooperation, such as rationality, justice sensitivity, altruistic punishment, Principal-agent theory, the fixed pie assumption, reciprocity, a game-theoretical view on trusting, and anchoring effects.

I thrust myself onto the books
In Influence, Robert Cialdini conveys six key concepts that determine how willingly people engage with one another. In Emergence, Steven Johnson writes about emergent patterns in software, city growth, and slime mold cells. He explains what it means to be a mind reader. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explains why we and other animals are machines created by our genes, and what qualities we can expect in them. In The Moral Animal and Nonzero, Robert Wright expores everything that matters.