Michael Geers

LIFE Fellow since 2020, MPI for Human Development

I am a PhD student in Psychology at the Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. My research investigates the psychology of consumer judgment and decision making. Specifically, I seek to better understand the pressure points between consumer behavior and online technologies, including misinformation and microtargeting, and to develop interventions to mitigate them. To achieve this, I use a combination of online, laboratory, and field experimental methods, and draw on insights from consumer research, psychology, and computational social science. Prior to graduate school, I earned a Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania. I also completed an MSc in Marketing with distinction (Trinity College Dublin) and a BA in Business Administration (Provadis School of International Management and Technology).

Dissertation project:

Rebalancing human and algorithmic decision making

Selected Publications

Roozenbeek, J., Maertens, R., Herzog, S. M., Geers, M., Kurvers, R., Sultan, M., & van der Linden, S. (2022). Susceptibility to misinformation is consistent across question framings and response modes and better explained by myside bias and partisanship than analytical thinking. Judgment and Decision Making, 17(3), 547–573. Full text

Sultan, M., Tump, A. N., Geers, M., Lorenz-Spreen, P., Herzog, S. M., & Kurvers, R. H. J. M. (2022). Time pressure reduces misinformation discrimination ability but does not alter response bias. Scientific Reports, 12, Article 22416. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26209-8

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), Article 15541. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-94796-z