Dominik Deffner
Postdoctoral Researcher
Mail: deffner@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Dominik is an evolutionary and computational behavioral scientist with a background in Psychology and Anthropology. His research broadly focuses on the individual-level learning processes and population-level social dynamics underlying human collective intelligence and adaptation. He mostly uses behavioral group experiments, computational and statistical modeling as well as formal mathematical theory. After a Master’s at the University of St. Andrews and a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, he now studies how human (and robotic) groups collectively balance individual and social information use (Project 34).
SCIoI Publications:
Tump, A., Deffner, D., Pleskac, T., Romanczuk, P., & Kurvers, R. (2023). A cognitive computational approach to social and collective decision-making. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/7aykm
Mezey, D., Deffner, D., Kurvers, R. H., & Romanczuk, P. (2023). Visual social information use in collective foraging. BioRxiv. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.30.569379
Deffner, D., Kandler, A., & Fogarty, L. (2022). Effective population size for culturally evolving traits. Plos Computational Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009430
Deffner, D., Mezey, D., Kahl, B., Schakowski, A., Romanczuk, P., Wu, C. M., & Kurvers, R. (2023). Collective incentives reduce over-exploitation of social information in unconstrained human groups. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/p3bj7
Deffner, D., Rohrer, J., & McElreath, R. (2022). A Causal Framework for Cross-Cultural Generalizability. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245922110636
Deffner, D., & McElreath, R. (2022). When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations. Plos One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267204
Breen, A., & Deffner, D. (2023). Leading an urban invasion: risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy. BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.19.533319