Veronika Zilker receives Heinz Heckhausen Award 2022 of the German Psychological Society

Veronika Zilker has received the Heinz Heckhausen Award 2022 of the German Psychological Society. Every two years, the society awards the prize to an outstanding doctoral thesis in the field of psychology. 

In her thesis entitled "Measuring and modeling the construction of preferences in decision making under risk", Veronika investigates how people form preferences among risky choice options (preference construction). To this end, she uses a skillful and innovative combination of experimental and computational methods to study how aspects of the choice context (e.g., the complexity of choice options) and psychological determinants (e.g., selective attention) shape the process of preference construction and the resulting choice. In doing so, Veronika offers possible explanations for classic findings in behavioral decision research: For instance, she demonstrates that differences in the complexity of choice options may be a major determinant of age differences in risk attitudes. Another finding presented in her work is that an imbalanced allocation of attention between choice options can lead to systematic differences in choice patterns and to seemingly deviation from economic reality. 

With her thesis, Veronika highlights the benefits of methodological and theoretical pluralism in psychological research and makes a crucial contribution to theory integration in the field of decision research. The Heinz Heckhausen Award is already the second award she earned for her thesis: The Free University of Berlin awarded Veronika the Gender Research Award 2021.