LIFE Program

Old lady reaches towards a baby — Paolo Bendandi, Unsplash

Paolo Bendandi, Unsplash

The goal of the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course (LIFE), established in 2002 and ongoing until 2025, was the study of systematic changes in human behavior over evolutionary and ontogenetic time. The target phenomenon of its successor, the new IMPRS on Learning, Institutions, and Future Evolution (LIFE), is the development of human behavior from infancy to old age in context, which we broadly define as the physical, social, cultural dimensions of the environment. We want to understand how people develop in their environment, act on it, and are influenced by it. This includes the way we live, where we live, how we make decisions, how we interact with artificial intelligence, and how our lives are changing through our own development.

While the thematic range in LIFE is broad, its conceptual mission remains focused and unique: LIFE promotes an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of human behavior that aims at identifying and understanding the mechanisms, institutions, and conditions that shape but also disrupt the way we think, learn, feel, and decide. Ultimately, this knowledge can contribute to enabling individuals and societies to change, and hopefully improve, the world we live in.

LIFE continues to offer students unique training in the dynamics of human behavior on different time scales in different contexts. These include long-term changes, such as in the evolution of culture, the emergence of institutions of learning, and in the rapidly developing digital environment, and short-term changes, such as in individual education processes, lifespan development, and institutionally regulated life-course processes.

The main educational objective of LIFE is to enrich the training of young researchers by exposure to an international and interdisciplinary context that actively promotes a developmental perspective. Transatlantic networking and communication are pivotal components of LIFE.

Background

Since the inception of the notion of human development in the 18th century, researchers have wrestled with the relationship between processes of evolution and processes of ontogenesis. Earlier attempts, such as the classical "ontogenesis as recapitulation of evolution" hypothesis, were typically one-sided in emphasis. Work in recent decades, however, with advances in evolutionary anthropology, cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, developmental behavior genetics, gerontological biology, developmental, and life-course psychology, as well as historical sociology, suggests a new and more integrative orientation. Theories and methods have become available that permit a more systematic analysis of the evolution-ontogeny interface in human development.

An additional emergent property of the human sciences is to view human development as a field that considers the life course as a whole. This expansion of the age foci is evident in most disciplines of the behavioral and social sciences. It is also spurred by the extended longevity and aging of populations witnessed in industrialized countries.

The new IMPRS LIFE places greater emphasis on the effects of the environment, in its broadest definition, on human behavior and cognition. LIFE students will be trained in and make use of the methods and concepts provided by developmental neuroscience, dynamic systems, computational social science, and machine learning, which offer much potential in this regard, in addition to training in psychology, sociology, and educational science.

LIFE Community

The LIFE community currently consists of 120 faculty members and over 60 fellows at the four sites in Berlin, Ann Arbor, Charlottesville, and Zurich. To support international course work and research collaborations, 4 coordinators are responsible for the development and organization of the graduate training and the exchange between LIFE faculty and fellows. More than 300 alumni complement the LIFE community. You can find information about them under People.