Thorsten Pachur

Thorsten Pachur is a Professor of Methods in Behavioral Research at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since 2022, affiliated with the TUM School of Management. His research focuses on adaptive cognition, particularly how psychological mechanisms underlying decision-making and judgment are shaped by environmental structures. Key areas include decision-making under uncertainty/risk, the role of intuition, and lifespan development of decision processes. He employs multi-method approaches combining behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging.

Education: Studied psychology at the Free University of Berlin and University of Sussex. Earned his PhD in Psychology from Free University of Berlin (2006) and completed his habilitation at University of Basel (2012). Prior roles include research associate at University of Basel (2006–2012) and senior scientist at Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2012–2022).

Research Interests:

• Cognitive mechanisms in decision-making
• Risk perception and risk-taking
• Developmental changes in decision strategies
• Computational modeling of judgment processes

Key Awards:

• Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) since 2017

His recent work explores topics like affective influences in risky choices, social sampling heuristics, and the cognitive dynamics of medical vs. financial decision-making across age groups.