Neele Engelmann

Cognitive Scientist

Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin), Center for Humans and Machines

Biography

I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Humans and Machines in Berlin, Germany. I obtained my Ph.D. in Psychology from Georg-August-University Göttingen in 2022, with a project focusing on the role of causal representations in moral judgment. Before my current position, I was a postdoc at the Center for Law, Behaviour, and Cognition at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. My research interests lie at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and law.

Interests

Moral Psychology
Human-AI interaction
Causal Reasoning
Experimental Philosophy
Experimental Jurisprudence
Computational Modelling
Open Science

Education

Dr. rer. nat. Psychology, 2022
Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany
M.Sc. Psychology, 2017
Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany
B.Sc. Psychology, 2014
Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany

Publications

click title for abstracts

Neele Engelmann, Guilherme F. C. F. Almeida, Felipe Oliveira de Sousa, Karolina Prochownik, Ivar Hannikainen, Noel Struchiner, Stefan Magen (2024). Apply the laws, if they are good: Moral evaluations linearly predict whether judges should apply the law. Cognitive Science, 48(10), e70001.

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Guilherme F. C. F. Almeida, José Luiz Nunes, Neele Engelmann, Alex Wiegmann, Marcelo de Araújo (2024). Exploring the psychology of GPT-4's moral and legal reasoning. Artificial Intelligence (333), 104145.

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Neele Engelmann, Ivar R. Hannikainen (2024). Does moral valence influence the construal of alternative possibilities?. Possibility Studies & Society.

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Neele Engelmann, Ivar R. Hannikainen, Carlos González-García, Maria Ruz (2024). Understanding rule enforcement using drift diffusion models. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (46).

PDF Project

Neele Engelmann, Lara Kirfel (2023). Who Caused It? Different Effects of Statistical and Prescriptive Abnormality on Causal Selection in Chains. In K. Tobia (Ed): The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence. Cambridge University Press [in press].

PDF Project

Simon Stephan, Neele Engelmann, Michael R. Waldmann (2023). The perceived dilution of causal strength. Cognitive Psychology, 140, 101540.

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Neele Engelmann (2023). Murderer at the door! To lie or to mislead?. In A. Wiegmann (Ed): Lying, fake news, and bullshit. Bloomsbury [in press].

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Alex Wiegmann, Neele Engelmann (2022). Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation. In L. Horn (Ed): From lying to perjury: Linguistic and legal perspectives on lies and other falsehoods. De Gruyter.

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Neele Engelmann, Michael R. Waldmann (2022). How to weigh lives. A computational model of moral judgment in multiple-outcome structures. Cognition, 218, 104910.

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Neele Engelmann, Michael R. Waldmann (2022). How causal structure, causal strength, and foreseeability affect moral judgments. Cognition, 226, 105167.

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Emanuel Viebahn, Alex Wiegmann, Neele Engelmann, Pascale Willemsen (2021). Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 8:7.

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Neele Engelmann, Michael R. Waldmann (2021). A causal proximity effect in moral judgment. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (43).

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Alex Wiegmann, Neele Engelmann (2020). Entwicklungen und Probleme der Moralpsychologie zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts. In N. Paulo & J. C. Bublitz (Hgs.): Empirische Ethik - Grundlagentexte aus Psychologie und Philosophie (pp. 139-175). Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

York Hagmayer, Neele Engelmann (2020). Asking questions to provide a causal explanation – Do people search for the information required by cognitive psychological theories?. In E. A. Bar-Asher Siegal & Boneh N. (Eds): Perspectives on Causation (pp. 121-147). Springer, Cham.

Neele Engelmann, Michael R. Waldmann (2019). Moral reasoning with multiple effects: Justification and moral responsibility for side effects. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 41 (pp. 1703-1709).

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York Hagmayer, Neele Engelmann (2014). Causal beliefs about depression in different cultural groups — what do cognitive psychological theories of causal learning and reasoning predict?. Frontiers in Psychology (5, 1303).

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Hansjörg Neth, Neele Engelmann, Ralf Mayrhofer (2014). Foraging for alternatives: ecological rationality in keeping options viable. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 36.

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Teaching & Supervision

I have been co-teaching introductory statistics since winter 2017, leading practical exercise and discussion sessions for first-year psychology students. The seminar “Quantitative Methods I” covers basics of research design and hypothesis testing, data visualisation, probability theory, descriptive and inferential data analysis, and power analyses. Practical exercises are held using MS Excel. “Quantitative Methods II” focuses on the General Linear Model and its various applications (multiple linear regression and its assumptions, ANOVA, contrast analyses, logistic regression, multilevel models). The practical exercises are conducted in R and RStudio.

Winter 2021/22: Quantitative Methods I
Summer 2021: Quantitative Methods II
Winter 2020/21: Quantitative Methods I
Summer 2020: Quantitative Methods II
Winter 2019/20: Quantitative Methods I
Summer 2019: Quantitative Methods II
Winter 2018/19: Quantitative Methods I
Summer 2018: Quantitative Methods II
Winter 2017/18: Quantitative Methods I

In addition, I have supervised and co-supervised a number of empirical Bachelor and Master projects in the fields of causal and moral reasoning and experimental philosophy.