Marlene Hecht

LIFE Fellow since 2021, MPI for Human Development

I am a doctoral student in Psychology at the Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC), MPIB. My research interests lie in the areas of judgement and decision making, social cognition, and information search. Specifically, under the supervision of Christin Schulze and Thorsten Pachur, I am currently examining how individuals sample information from (online) social networks to infer characteristics of the world at large. Prior to joining ARC, I earned a MSc in Psychology at HU Berlin. Before this, I completed a BSc in Psychology and a BA in Communication Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Dissertation project:

Social sampling from online and offline contacts: Information search, adaptive use, and developmental differences

Selected Publications

Hecht, M., Schulze, C., & Pachur, T. (in press). Models of social sampling. In T. Reimer, L. van Swol, & A. Florack (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of communication and social cognition. Routledge/Taylor and Francis.

Ruggeri, K., Stock, F., Haslam, S. A., Capraro, V., Boggio, P., ...Kitayama, S., ... Hecht, M., ... Willer, R. (2024). A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19. Nature, 625, 134–147. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06840-9

Hecht, M., Pachur, T., & Schulze, C. (2022). Does social sampling differ between online and offline contacts? A computational modeling analysis. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0c161487