About Me

We live in a time of deep political and societal transformation with disagreements about how to mitigate or adapt to climate change, reduce growing inequality, manage migration and foster diversity underlying many of the social dynamics. Indeed, we observe growing polarisation about such questions, more and more identity-driven discourse, and a rise in authoritarian sentiment. What drives these trends? And how do our individual beliefs shape—and get shaped by—our social environments?

Currently, I am interested in individual-level belief systems: how belief systems provide people with feelings of coherence or dissonance for example when they face new information, how people adapt their belief systems in social contexts, and how the structure of belief systems can grow increasingly different between individuals. In sum, I aim to explore how changing and heterogeneous belief systems contribute to societal patterns like consensus, fragmentation, or perceived polarisation.

Previously, I explored how cognitive biases (e.g., biases related to social identity or confirmation bias) and ambiguous communication affect societal opinion dynamics — sometimes in quite unexpected ways. Before shifting to the social sciences, I had studied physics and applied mathematics and did some work on climate modelling. I was always and continue to be fascinated by the fuzzy overlap between the natural and social sciences regarding the science of climate change.