Member of Perception and Action Lab

Helen Fischer has been a postdoc at the IWM in the Perception and Action group since April 2022. She investigates the role of metacognition, our insight into the reliability and the limits of one's own knowledge for beliefs about politicized science such as climate change or COVID-19. Her work illuminates the importance of metacognition for recognizing one's own errors in reasoning, such as motivated information processing and biased information transfer in social networks. In the winter semester 2023/24, she held a visiting professorship for Science and Society at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In 2024, she was accepted into the DFG Heisenberg programme.

Helen Fischer received her doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Heidelberg in 2016. After postdoc positions at the University of Heidelberg on public perception of climate change, she received a postdoc fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2019. Helen Fischer worked at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2019-2020 and was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, in 2020-2022. Since 2022 she has been researching at the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media, Tübingen, and is doing a research stay at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where she is researching the longitudinal connection between social media use and beliefs about climate change in a project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.