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.
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.
A Metacognitive Account of Politicized Science
Climate change denial in the digital age: An in-depth analysis of the effects of social media use
Communicating Politicized Science
Info-noise: Investigating the cognitive effects of noisy information environments
Geers, M., Fischer, H., Lewandowsky, S., & Herzog, S. (in press). The political (a)symmetry of metacognitive insight into detecting misinformation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Fischer, H., Huff, M., Anders, G., & Said, N. (2023). Metacognition, public health compliance, and vaccination willingness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(43), Article e2105425120. https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105425120
Open Access
Fischer, H., Wijermans, N., & Schlüter, M. (2023). Testing the social function of metacognition for common‐pool resource use. Cognitive Science, 47(3), Article e13212. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13212
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Holford, D., Fasce, A., Tapper, K., Demko, M., Lewandowsky, S., Hahn, U., Abels, C. M., Al-Rawi, A., Alladin, S., Sonia Boender, T., Bruns, H., Fischer, H., Gilde, C., Hanel, P. H., Herzog, S. M., Kause, A., Lehmann, S., Nurse, M. S., Orr, C., Pescetelli, N., Petrescu, M., Sah, S., Schmid, P., Sirota, M., & Wulf, M. (2023). Science communication as a collective intelligence endeavor: A manifesto and examples for implementation. Science Communication, 45(4), 539-554. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10755470231162634
Open Access
van den Broek, K. L., Luomba, J., van den Broek, J., & Fischer, H. (2023). Content and complexity of stakeholders’ mental models of socio-ecological systems. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 85, Article 101906. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101906
Open Access
Fischer, H., Huff, M., & Said, N. (2022). Polarized climate change beliefs: No evidence for science literacy driving motivated reasoning in a U.S. national study. American Psychologist, 77(7), 822-835. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000982 [Data]
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Fischer, H., & Said, N. (2021). Importance of domain-specific metacognition for explaining beliefs about politicized science: the case of climate change. Cognition, 208, Article 104545. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104545
Said, N., Fischer, H., & Anders, G. (2021). Contested science: Individuals with higher metacognitive insight into interpretation of evidence are less likely to polarize. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29(2), 668-680. *Equal contribution. https://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01993-y
Fischer, H., van den Broek, K. L., Ramisch, K., & Okan, Y. (2020). When IPCC graphs can foster or bias understanding: evidence among decision-makers from governmental and non-governmental institutions. Environmental Research Letters, 15(11), Article 114041. https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abbc3c
Open Access
Amelung, D., Fischer, H., Herrmann, A., Aall, C., Louis, V. R., Becher, H., Wilkinson, P., & Sauerborn, R. (2019). Human health as a motivator for climate change mitigation: results from four European high-income countries. Global Environmental Change, 57, Article 101918. *Equal contribution. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.05.002
Fischer, H., Amelung, D., & Said, N. (2019). The accuracy of German citizens’ confidence in their climate change knowledge. Nature Climate Change, 9(10), 776-780. https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0563-0
Watts, N., Amann, M., Arnell, N., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., Belesova, K., Berry, H., Bouley, T., Boykoff, M., Byass, P., Cai, W., Campbell-Lendrum, D., Chambers, J., Daly, M., Dasandi, N., Davies, M., Depoux, A., Dominguez-Salas, P., Drummond, P., Fischer, H., & Costello, A. (2018). The 2018 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: shaping the health of nations for centuries to come. The Lancet, 392(10163), 2479-2514. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(18)32594-7
Fischer, H., & van den Broek, K. (2021). Climate change knowledge, meta-knowledge and beliefs. In A. Franzen & S. Mader (Eds.), Research Handbook on Environmental Sociology (pp. 116-132). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800370456.00015
Fischer, H. (2024, February 20). Objective and subjective knowledge: “Feeling the truth” and its importance for science communication. Munich Science Communication Lab talk series. Munich. [Talk]
Fischer, H. (2023, Juli 6). Echtes Wissen und gefühltes Wissen: Bedeutung für Wissenschaftskommunikation und Handeln im Bereich politisierter Wissenschaft. Eingeladener Vortrag auf dem Tag der interdisziplinären Wissenschaftskommunikation. Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Heidelberg. [Vortrag]
Fischer, H. (2023, June 30 - July 4). To confuse rather than convince: A metacognitive perspective on the zone-flooding strategy of misinformation. Invited talk at the Symposium of the European Association for Social Psychology (EASP 2023). Krakow, Poland. [Talk]
Fischer, H. (2023, Januar 24). Wissen, was man weiß und verrauschte Informationsumgebungen. Eingeladener Vortrag auf dem Forschungskolloquium des Departments für Wissenschaftskommunikation. KIT, Karlsruhe. [Vortrag]
Fischer, H. (2023, November 20). Inflation und planetary health: Ergebnisse einer metakognitiven Begleitstudie. Eingeladener Vortrag im Munich Science Communication Lab und Deutsches Museum. München. [Vortrag]
Fischer, H. (2023, Mai 23). Metakognition und Klimawandel: Ein individuell-kognitiver Blick auf ein globales Problem. Eingeladener Vortrag zum Kolloquium im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe Seele-Körper-Geist. Universitätsklinikum Freiburg. [Vortrag]
Fischer, H. (2022, May 3). How good are IPCC graphs at communicating climate change to policy-makers? Invited talk at The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP), Sciences Po. Paris, France. [Talk]
Fischer, H. (2022, June 23-25). Communicating politicized science – A cognitive perspective. Invited talk at the Jubilee Symposium. The Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Heidelberg University Hospital. [Talk]
Fischer, H. (2022, May 18). A metacognitive perspective on politicized science. Invited talk at the Psychonomic Society's One World Cognitive Psychology Seminar Series. University of Mannheim. [Talk]
Fischer, H. (2022, December 13). Knowing what you know in noisy information environments. Invited talk at the Kolloquium Department Wissenschaftskommunikation. KIT, Karlsruhe. [Talk]
Fischer, H., Huff, M., & Said, N. (2022, September 10-15). Political polarization and climate science: No evidence for science literacy driving motivated reasoning in a US national study. Eingeladener Vortrag auf dem 52. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie (DGPs). Symposium "Science Communication--Quo vadis?". Hildesheim. [Talk]
Holford, D., Fasce, A., Tapper, K., Demko, M., Lewandowsky, S., Hahn, U., Al-Rawi, A., Alladin, S., Boender, T. S., Bruns, H., Fischer, H., Gilde, C., Hanel, P. H. P., Herzog, S. M., Kause, A., Lehmann, S., Nurse, M. S., Orr, C., Pescetelli, N., & Wulf, M. (2022). A manifesto for science communication as collective intelligence. https://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/TZUFW
Wijermans, N., & Fischer, H. (2022). “AgentEx-Meta” (Version 1.0.0). CoMSES Computational Model Library. https://doi.org/10.25937/cs13-mr12
Dr. Helen Fischer
Schleichstraße 6