Thorsten Pachur is professor for Behavioral Research Methods at the TUM School of Management.
Thorsten investigates adaptive cognition, that is, how the psychological mechanisms underlying thinking, reasoning, and decision making are shaped by the structure of the environment. A key idea is that successful decision making can arise from the intelligent use of simple strategies—heuristics—that exploit regularities in the environment. Thorsten’s research covers decision making under risk and judgment under uncertainty and he is also interested in the role of intuition and how decision making develops across the lifespan. In his research, Thorsten employs an integrative multi-method approach that includes behavioral experiments, computational modeling, process tracing (e.g., eye tracking), and neuroimaging.
Before joining TUM in April 2022, Thorsten worked as Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality located at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
In 2017 Thorsten was appointed Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. From 2025 he will be Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Psychology.
Before working at the Center for Adaptive Rationality Thorsten worked as a research scientist at the University of Basel, where he obtained his habilitation in 2012. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Free University Berlin.
Research topics
- Decision making under risk and uncertainty
- Attentional processes during decision making
- The influence of emotions on decision making
- Heuristics and bounded rationality
- Decision making in a social world
- The development of decision making across the life span
- Experimental, statistical, and computational methods
Selected publications
Zilker, V., & Pachur, T. (2022). Nonlinear probability weighting can reflect attentional biases in sequential sampling. Psychological Review, 129(5), 949–975. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000304
Pachur, T. (2022). Strategy selection in decisions from givens: Deciding at a glance? Cognitive Psychology, 136, Article 101483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101483
Krefeld-Schwalb, A., Pachur, T., & Scheibehenne, B. (2022). Structural parameter interdependencies in computational models of cognition. Psychological Review, 129(2), 313–339. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000285
Pachur, T., Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M., Murphy, R. O., & Hertwig, R. (2018). Prospect theory reflects selective allocation of attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147, 147–169. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000406
Pachur, T., Suter, R. S., & Hertwig, R. (2017). How the twain can meet: Prospect theory and models of heuristics in risky choice. Cognitive Psychology, 93, 44–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.01.001
Pachur, T., Mata, R., & Hertwig, R. (2017). Who dares, who errs? Disentangling cognitive and motivational roots of age differences in decisions under risk. Psychological Science, 28, 504–518. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616687729
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