Dr. Patricia Kanngießer Receives Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation

Five-year Funding for Research on Social Norms. Psychologist Dr. Patricia Kanngießer has been granted funding amounting to 561,500 euros from the Volkswagen Foundation for her research on social norms. An international panel of experts chose her project, "Navigating the social world - A cross-cultural and developmental perspective on social norms," in which she examines the influence of the cultural environment on social norms. For this project, she will change from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to Freie Universität Berlin in January 2016. At the Department of Education and Psychology at Freie Universität, Kanngießer will build up a junior research group to investigate the development of social rules within different cultures. Previous research on the development of social standards and the psychological foundations of this development was done mainly on children in Western societies. Research on adults from different cultures, however, demonstrated that their understanding of norms varies considerably.