Academic interests
Yannic is a political psychology researcher interested in the interaction of human social psychology and digital environments. He analyses how citizens‘ political attitudes are influenced by others’ political attitudes expressed online. As part of the AI:Democracy group, he also focuses on how technologies such as feed algorithms or bots channel these social influence processes.
Methodologically, Yannic draws on a combination of online behavioural observation, experiments and computational modelling. To analyse large amounts of social media data, he uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) methods, for example in the form of algorithmic text classification and sentiment analysis.
Keywords:
- Political attitudes
- Social influence
- Social media
- Artificial intelligence
- Machine-learning / Natural Language Processing Methods
- Computational Social Psychology
PhD Project
In his PhD Project “How does political mistrust spread via social media? Combining Experimental and Machine Learning methods”, he studies how individuals’ political trust is affected by others’ expressed political trust, and how such social influence may cause political mistrust to spread via social media.
Education
Yannic holds a master’s degree in Social and Cultural Psychology from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Besides psychology, Yannic studied cultural anthropology and political science for three years.
Supervision and Teaching
Yannic supervises bachelor and master students. He teaches seminars in
- PSY3095 - Bacheloroppgave i kultur- og samfunnspsykologi
- PSYC1201 – Sosialpsykologi
- PSY2503 – Kultur- og samfunnspsykologi
- PSY2105 – Hands-on Science in Psychology
and gave lectures in
- PSY1050 – Psykologi: Teori og praksis
- PSY2503 – Kultur- og samfunnspsykologi
- PSY4505 – Identity, culture and critical psychology
Awards and Scholarships
- 2021-2022: Scholarship for master's studies abroad by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
- 2021: Mitacs Globallink Scholarship for research internship in Canada
- 2017 - 2022: General Scholarship for bachelor's and master's studies by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes e.V.)