WZB - Berlin Social Science Center

Understanding how people communicate is what economist Puja Bhattacharya is after. To her, promises are a particularly interesting form of communication. As experiments have shown, people are more likely to keep a promise if they act as individuals while being less inclined to if they form part of a group.

Children whose parents didn't study are less likely to find their way into universites. Educational biographies in Germany are still strongly affected by social background. In this video, higher education researcher Claudia Finger relates how simple yet effective methods, such as workshops, are able to counter such imbalances.

Selective perception tends to produce an overestimation of opportunities: restaurant founders, for example, can fail if their predictions are based exclusively on successful cases. Economist Kai Barron examines how convictions and expectations guide human behavior - and how they may deceive us.