The Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences (cds.unibas.ch) at the Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Switzerland, is seeking junior researchers to study the psychology and communication of evidence and uncertainty, and possible applications in the domains of health, finance, and sustainability.

The current pandemic has made clear the challenges associated with understanding and communicating risks, including those involved in pharmacological and non- pharmacological interventions. But the Covid pandemic is only one of the challenges facings us today, with major decisions on the horizon concerning financial and environmental risks ahead.

In our project, we hope to elucidate how people understand such risks and how different modes of risk communication – verbal descriptions, graphs, or simulations – can be effective in communicating evidence and uncertainty. We will address these questions from different angles. We plan to use 1) natural language processing and machine learning to characterize and predict people’s understanding of risks, 2) bibliographic and review-based approaches to summarize the extant literature, and 3) laboratory and field studies to investigate the efficacy and underlying mechanisms of communication modes.

We offer one Doctoral Position (3 years; ca. 47,000 Swiss Francs per year) and one or more Research Internships (3 months or longer; remote or at location).

You will work together with Dr. Dirk Wulff and Prof. Dr. Rui Mata and be part of an active research environment that includes regular research talks, journal clubs, and hackathons on topics in the decision sciences and applied data science. The doctoral position is part of the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Doctoral program, which offers a number of additional training opportunities and expert workshops. For more information on the program visit https://exp.psycho.unibas.ch/swedoc.

The University of Basel is an equal opportunity and family friendly employer committed to excellence through diversity. To increase the number of women in leading academic positions the university strongly encourages applications from women.

If you are interested or have any questions, please feel free to reach out informally to Dirk Wulff (dirk.wulff@unibas.ch).