David J. Grüning

David J. Grüning

Interested in too many things in psychology.
On the hunt for a concentration.

Student & researcher at Heidelberg University. Additionally involved here and there, e.g., Brown, Oslo, Mannheim, GESIS, Max-Planck.

(Last website update: 14.04.2021)

Publications

Power and Sociability

Published in The social psychology of sociability, 2022

Coming soon…

Recommended citation: Prepared for: Krueger, J. I., Grüning, D. J. , & Sundar, T. (2022). The social psychology of sociability. Taylor & Francis. Publication is next year

Strategic Thinking: A Random Walk into the Rabbit Hole

Published in Collabra: Cognitive Psychology, 2021

At its best, strategic thinking yields an advantage needed to beat an opponent. At the least, it protects the person from exploitation. In four studies, conducted in two countries, we used a simple number-guessing game, in which one respondent wins by guessing the number chosen by another. We show that people generate numbers nonrandomly, and, on the basis of this finding, we predict and find that nonrandom strategic choice is advantageous to the guesser if the chooser does not randomize either. As expected, respondents in the role of the guesser preferred to play a game in which they were to actively think of a number instead of randomizing if the chooser had to think of a number, too. Guessers did not prefer thinking if the chooser selected a number randomly. Having shown these limitations to strategic reasoning, we close with the observation that successful strategic reasoning may – at times – require the breaking of rules and being the first to do so.

Psychological perversities and populism

Published in The Psychology of Populism: The Tribal Challenge to Liberal Democracy, 2021

Gabriel García Márquez, the shaman of magical realism, knew that uncertainty, in literature and in life, has its perversities. Here, we explore some facets of uncertainty, the human desire to escape from it, and its implications for populism (see also Kruglanski et al., this volume).

Recommended citation: Krueger, J. I., & Grüning, D. J. (2021). Psychological perversities and populism. The Psychology of Populism: The Tribal Challenge to Liberal Democracy, 125. http://www.sydneysymposium.unsw.edu.au/2020/chapters/KruegerSSSP2020.pdf

Proper understanding of grounded procedures of separation needs a dual inheritance approach

Published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2021

Grounded procedures of separation are conceptualized as a learned concept. The simultaneous cultural universality of the general idea and immense diversity of its implementations might be better understood through the lens of dual inheritance theories. By drawing on examples from developmental psychology and emotion theorizing, we argue that an innate blueprint might underlie learned implementations of cleansing that vary widely.

Recommended citation: Schubert, T., & Grüning, D. (2021). Proper understanding of grounded procedures of separation needs a dual inheritance approach. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E23. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000394 cambridge-core-share-proper-understanding-of-ground…