Welcome Page

Welcome to the homepage of the Department of Economic and Social Psychology. Below we would like to introduce our field of activity, our main research areas and of course ourselves.

Economic Psychology deals with the experience and behavior of human beings in an economic context. It is separated into the areas of occupational psychology (e.g. work load and occupational stress/load and stress on the job, selection of personnel, human resource development), market psychology (e.g. advertising effectiveness, market segmentation) and financial psychology (e.g. investor behavior, tax compliance). Our exploratory focus is on financial psychology, particularly escalation on loss making investment decisions as well as price perception (for example in the context of the EURO introduction). Furthermore we analyze „mental satiation“ in the working life from the area of occupational psychology.

The subject of Social Psychology is how human thoughts and behavior are influenced by perceived or expected thoughts, expressions and behaviors of others. In particular social psychologists deal with the perception of others, social stereotypes, attitudes, interactions and relationships between different people, behavior in and between social groups as well as the dependence of human thoughts and behavior on factors like culture or language. The focus of our social psychological research is on group processes, especially on small-group decision-making processes.

Our research methodology is primarily based on laboratory experiments but is supplemented by field research methods in an appropriate manner.