We invite applications for a doctoral position as part of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Shifting Mindsets for Sustainable Consumption (SUSCON)” funded by the European Union under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hofmann and located in the Department of Social and Environmental Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology at the Ruhr University Bochum. For more information on our research, please visit https://www.soc.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ Ruhr University Bochum is one of Germany’s leading research universities, offering a collaborative and interdisciplinary research environment on a unified, modern campus. Unsustainable consumption is a key driver of the climate crisis and must be urgently addressed to stay within planetary boundaries. Despite widespread awareness, personal lifestyle changes have proven insufficient and difficult. Rather than relying on individual self-control alone, major structural policy solutions addressing the systemic roots of the social dilemma of unsustainable consumption are needed. Thus, citizens, as well as policymakers, need to become more aware of the significant constraints to sustainable lifestyles and to support and actively promote such policy solutions. This very process is often psychologically hindered by an overemphasis on personal responsibility and an underestimation of the structural forces shaping sustainable behavior. The SUSCON project aims to expose such limitations and the potentials of a “structural mindset” that better recognizes systemic drivers of behavior and supports collective, structural solutions. Drawing on experimental psychology, behavioral economics, political psychology, and AI-based discourse analysis, SUSCON will examine how different mindsets affect cooperation, policy support, and attribution of responsibility in both citizens and policymakers.
The doctoral researcher will work at the intersection of environmental and political psychology and computational text analysis, contributing primarily to Work Package 3.3. This work package applies recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) to sustainability discourse, with the aim of developing theoretically grounded methods for extracting psychologically meaningful signals from political language and linking these patterns to real-world policy outcomes. Beyond model development, the position offers substantial scope for shaping the conceptual and empirical direction of this research line. The position additionally involves contributions to a citizen survey project on policy acceptance and to survey and experimental studies involving policymakers.
