Thomas Schilling's
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Profile (ORCiD: 0000-0002-5150-612X)

Research Interests

Academic Education

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Here is my university profile

Thomas Schilling, Postdoctoral researcher, Trier University

Profile (ORCiD: 0000-0002-5150-612X)

Hi there, and thanks for stopping by!

I'm a researcher in experimental social and personality psychology, currently working at the University of Trier in Germany. My research explores how psychological traits shape financial decision-making and consumer behavior, especially in digital environments. I design and analyze experiments to better understand why people fall for manipulative online design patterns (like defaults or scarcity cues), and how individual differences—such as personality traits—make people more or less susceptible.

My path into psychology was shaped by an early interest in behavioral finance during my undergraduate studies in business administration. I became fascinated by how cognitive and emotional factors influence economic choices—leading me to pursue a PhD in behavioral economics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where I was a scholar at the Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change. My doctoral research focused on behavioral insurance and the role of personality traits in risk-related decisions.

I'm also working as a behavioral scientist at Behavioural by Design, where we help organizations apply behavioral insights to improve financial well-being and decision-making.

Outside of work, I love spending time in nature—whether it’s hiking in the mountains or taking walks in the forest. Since my daughter's birth in July 2024, I reduced my work time (part-time parental leave) and enjoy spending time playing, crawlling, babbling with her. If time permits, I practice yoga and do own body exercises to keep the body fit. I love physical and mental challenges and enjoy resisting the urge to act on impulses and social media. And in everything I do, I try my best to keep a mindset of curiosity and balance with an understanding of human nature.

Feel free to reach out if you're interested in collaboration, consulting, or simply geeking out about behavioral science, dark patterns and digital nudging, or personality traits!

Research Interests

My research interest is behavioral science, a cross-research field of social psychology, cognitive psychology, and microeconomics. I focus on the psychological (i.e. emotional, intuitional, and “supposedly irrational”) aspects of human decision-making in various contexts. My research largely involves the association of people's personality with their decisions (personality economics) and an investigation of cognitive biases, heuristics, and how people make decisions and judge about decisions in different situations. My aim is to understand what factors drive financial decisions and consumer choices in various contexts and how we might be able to improve people's decisions/choices. My research uses surveys and experiments to understand people's choices and behaviors.

One big topic of my research is the investigation of how personality traits predict people's financial decisions (e.g., savings, investment, borrowing) and their online consumption (e.g. purchases online). In this research, amongst other things, I examine dark patterns on digital platforms. Dark patterns are user interface designs that, for example, aim to influence consumers' choices so that they buy more and more impulsively the vendor's target products. These user interface designs were examined by marketing researchers and consumer psychologists for a long time and have recently attracted attention by human-computer interaction scholars, legal scholars, regulators, and policymakers.

I also ventured into judgment and decision-making research in the broad field of artificial intelligence (AI), where I examined what factors influence people's trust in and acceptance of AI, and what affects their judgments of justice and fairness of these systems.

During my PhD research, I investigated how and why people make insurance decisions. I used laboratory experiments and secondary (longitudinal survey) data to understand insurance decisions. With experimental data, I investigated home insurance decisions against catastrophes (natural disasters). With secondary data (SOEP), I investigated various insurance decisions. I used personality as predictors of insurance choices. I also studied how people's personality evolves, i.e. what factors affect the development of personality traits.

Academic Education

Doctor of Philosophy in Economics ("Personality Economics"), Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. (Available here).
Master of Science in Business Administration (specialization in finance and accounting), University of Trier, Trier, Germany.
Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration (specialization in finance and accounting), University of Applied Sciences Trier, Trier, Germany.