Michael Geers

Fellow
LIFE Berlin

LIFE Fellow since 2020, MPI for Human Development

I am a behavioral marketing researcher and a postdoc at the Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. My research explores consumer behavior in the online world using insights and methods from psychology, marketing, and computational social science. I have two main lines of research. The first seeks to better understand how consumers grapple with information online. My second line of research aims to empower consumers to navigate online environments and guard themselves against manipulation. I draw on a range of empirical methods, including surveys, online experiments, field studies, and combinations thereof.

Dissertation project:
Understanding and Boosting Decision Making in Online Environments

Selected publications:

Geers, M., Fischer, H., Lewandowsky, S., & Herzog, S.M. (in press). The political (a)symmetry of metacognitive insight into detecting misinformation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. DOI:10.31234/osf.io/5mc8s

Kozyreva, A., Lorenz-Spreen, P., Herzog, S.M., Ecker, U.K.H., Lewandowsky, S., Hertwig, R., Ayesha, A., Bak-Coleman, J., Barzilai, S., Basol M., Berinsky, A.J., Betsch, C., Cook, J., Fazio, L.K., Geers, M., Guess, A.M., Huang, H., Larreguy, H., Maertens, R., Panizza, F., Pennycook, G., Rand, D., Rathje, S., Reifler, J., Schmid, P., Smith, M., Swire-Thomson, B., Szewach, P., van der Linden, S., & Wineburg, S. (2024). Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation. Nature Human Behaviour. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01881-0

Geers, M., Swire-Thompson, B., Lorenz-Spreen, P., Herzog, S. M., Kozyreva, A., & Hertwig, R. (2024). The Online Misinformation Engagement Framework. Current Opinion in Psychology, 55, 101739. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101739

Lorenz-Spreen, P., Geers, M., Pachur, T., Hertwig, R., Lewandowsky, S., & Herzog, S.M. (2021). Boosting people’s ability to detect microtargeted advertising. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-94796-z