Research

I am interested to find out whether the presentation of numerical information has any impact on the recipients' attitude and consequently behaviour. My current research seems to indicate that there is no impact but that there is a bias in how effective people perceive statistics to be.

I am also interested in cognitive biases and heuristics in general, and how people fall prey to fallacies in everyday thinking. Closely related to that is my interest in critical thinking as such, and my deep, personal enthusiasm for research methods.

• Research methods
• Cognitive biases
• Numeracy
• Understanding and handling of statistical information
• Impact of statistical information on attitude and behaviour
• Critical & sceptical thinking

Vita

• Graduated with a Masters in Linguistics at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, in 2002 - with an academic year spent at the University of Edinburgh in 1999/2000
• HR consultant with Harvey Nash HR Consulting from 2002 to 2003
• Recruiting Specialist with McKinsey&Company, Inc. from 2003 to 2006
• PhD Student at the Psychology department at the University of Leicester since 2006 (first part-time, since October 2007 full-time), my supervisors are Dr Briony Pulford and Prof Andrew Colman. Graduate Teaching Assistant at University of Leicester since October 2007

Recent Publications

• Rudloff, D. (2008). Indications of a “better-than-average” effect of perceived effectiveness of statistical information in persuasion. Poster at Annual Conference BPS Cognitive Section, Southampton, September 8-10, 2008.

• Invited speaker to Skeptics in the Pub series, Leicester, January 20, 2009. Mental Shortcuts - A Necessary Evil?

• Rudloff, D. (2009, January). E-Lab-Oration: From online questionnaires to a “real-time” experiment about information formats and elaboration". Presentation at the University of Leicester School of Psychology Internal Research Seminar Series, Leicester, UK.

• Invited speaker to Skeptics in the Pub series, Edinburgh, January 21, 2010. Mental Shortcuts - A Necessary Evil?

• Rudloff, D. (2010, February). Perceived vs. actual impact of presentation format on recall. Presentation at the University of Leicester School ofPsychology Internal Research Seminar Series, Leicester, UK.

Complete list of publications here

In Preparation

• Invited speaker to Skeptics in the Pub series, Liverpool, March 18, 2010. Mental Shortcuts - A Necessary Evil?

Recent Grants

• None to date

Research links

• These websites offer to include links to online research, and I found them to be quite helpful for recruiting more participants: Psychological Research on the Net, Online Psychology Research in the UK.
• This is a blog written by Talya Miron-Schatz and hosted by the Psychology Today website. Talya describes how we manage (or not, as it were) handling numerical information.
• Need some stats help?