Main interests:
- Collective behaviour and cultural evolution
- Cognitive-computational modeling and Bayesian inference
- Causal inference
- Cross-cultural methods
- (Collective) foraging
Short CV:
Since 2025 Tenure-track professorship for Computational Modelling of Behaviour at the Department of Psychology at Philipps University Marburg
2021 – 2024 Postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster, Berlin
2018 – 2021 PhD (Dr.rer.nat.), Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
2016 – 2017 MSc, University of St Andrews, UK, Evolutionary and Comparative Psychology
2012 – 2016 BSc, Philipps University Marburg, Psychology
2012 – 2016 BA, Philipps University Marburg, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Philosophy
Top 10 publications:
- Deffner, D., Fedorova, N., Andrews, J. & McElreath, R. (2024). Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(48).
- Deffner, D., Mezey, D., Kahl, B., Schakowski, A., Romanczuk, P., Wu, C.M. & Kurvers, R.H.J.M. (2024). Collective incentives reduce over-exploitation of social information in unconstrained human groups. Nature Communications, 15(1), 2683.
- Tump*, A. N., Deffner*, D., Pleskac, T.J., Romanczuk, P., & Kurvers, R.H.J.M. (2024). A cognitive computational approach to social and collective decision-making. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(2), 538-551.
- Breen, A.J. & Deffner, D. (2024). Leading an urban invasion: risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy. eLife, 12, RP89315.
- Mezey, D., Deffner, D., Kurvers, R.H.J.M. & Romanczuk, P. (2024). Visual social information use in collective foraging. PLOS Computational Biology, 20(5), e1012087.
- Deffner, D., Rohrer, J.M & McElreath, R. (2022). A causal framework for cross-cultural generalizability. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 5(3).
- Deffner, D., Kandler, & Fogarty, L. (2022). Effective population size for culturally evolving traits. PLOS Computational Biology, 18(4).
- Deffner, D., & McElreath, R. (2022). When does selection favor learning from the old? Social Learning in age-structured populations. PLOS One, 17(4).
- Deffner, D., Kleinow, V. & McElreath, R. (2020). Dynamic Social Learning in Temporally and Spatially Variable Environments. Royal Society Open Science, 7(12), 200734.
- Clark*, A. D., Deffner*, D., Laland, K., Odling-Smee, J., & Endler, J. (2020). Niche construction affects the variability and strength of natural selection. The American Naturalist, 195(1), 16-30.
For a full list of publications, please see my Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=hqddLuwAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
