Dominik Deffner

Dominik Deffner is a computational behavioral scientist and Professor at the Department of Psychology, Philipps University Marburg. His work bridges psychology, evolutionary biology, and statistics to study how individuals, groups, and populations adapt to changing environments through computational modeling and empirical research.

• Education: PhD in Biology (2021), MSc in Evolutionary and Comparative Psychology (2017), BSc in Psychology (2016), BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology & Philosophy (2016)

Research interests include:

• Collective Behavior - Using immersive games and field research to model real-world group dynamics.
• Cultural Evolution - Simulations to study how culture emerges from individual decisions.
• Causal Inference - Developing transparent statistical frameworks to justify causal claims in psychology.
• Cross-cultural Methods - Creating workflows for comparing data across populations.
• Animal Adaptation - Applying computational models to non-human species' cognitive processes.

Publications (2025–2019) span cultural evolution, collective decision-making, risk-sensitive learning, and causal modeling, with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches. Recent work includes applying Bayesian methods to cross-cultural studies and analyzing social information use in human and animal groups.

Students: No formal advisees listed in the provided texts.