Below you will find an overview of the most important elements for writing your master thesis, such as the supervision process, general structure requirements and citation format.

Requirements for Writing a Master Thesis: 

• Completed „Fundamentals of Scientific Writing“ course or similar course. Students could write the master thesis in parallel to the course, but a consecutive sequence is recommended. It is not possible to write a master thesis before enrolling in this course!

• Prior knowledge of/strong interest in psychology, behavioral economics, or data analytics is a prerequisite for writing a master thesis at the Institute for Cognition and Behavior.

• Within the Institute of Cognition and Behavior, it is possible to work on pre-specified research questions, but students are also very welcome to present their own ideas for their thesis. Below you can find the current list of researchers that are available for thesis supervision. If you are interested in any of the research areas, please feel free to contact the respective researcher via email stating (1) your approximate starting time, (2) general or specific area of interest, and (3) a short description of your background in the research area of the institute. 

• Typically, a master thesis will be prepared within 6 months with around 55 working days or 500 working hours expected to go into it. There is no set number of expected pages as this usually depends on the topic. Usually, you discuss your work between 2-4 times with your supervisor (more if the complexity of the research question or method calls for it).

Possible Supervisors

As the supervision depends on available resources, we suggest getting in touch as early as possible with your potential supervisor.

Susann Fiedler

• Areas of Interest: Judgment & Decision Making, Motivation, Discrimination, Cooperation, Trust, Bounded Ethicality, Counterproductive Workplace Behavior, Social and Economic Cognition, Information Search and Processing, Polarisation, Group interactions, Smart Institutional Design, Wellbeing, Autonomy, Decision Biases

• Methods: Meta-Analysis, Lab, Online and Field Experiments, Eye-Tracking Experiments

Hooman Habibnia

• Areas of Interest: Inequality, Inequality perception, Motivated beliefs and cognition, Discrimination, Group interaction, Behavioral interventions

• Methods: Lab and online experiments, Literature review

Margeret Hall

• Areas of Interest: Internet Research, Social Media, Online Communities, User Behaviour, Participation, Vulnerability, Dark Side of the Internet, Maladaptive Behaviour, Digital Divide, Problem-Based Learning, Technical Education, Education Analytics, Computational Social Science, Social Computing, HCI

• Methods: Text Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Computer Vision, Data Mining, Applied AI, Applied ML, Network Analysis, Surveys, Mixed-Methods

Dejan Tatić

• Areas of Interest: Cyberpsychology, Behavioral Economics, Human-Computer Interaction, Gullibility, Credulity, Misinformation, Misplaced Trust.

• Methods: Experimental Research, Systematic literature Review.

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