Franziska Brändle

We currently have an open PhD position!

If you're interested, click here for more information.

I'm an independent research group leader at the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, as part of the The Adaptive Mind excellence cluster.

Before Gießen, I was a PostDoc with Christopher Summerfield at the University of Oxford and held a Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College. Before Oxford, I completed my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics with Eric Schulz in Tübingen, Germany.

I'm interested in understanding people's intrinsic motivations. Which tasks attract us to spend our free time on? Why do we keep engaging with activities that frustrate us? And why are we sometimes avoiding effort, while at other times we actively seek it out? My research goal is to answer these questions by establishing an ecologically valid science of intrinsic motivation through using video games together with computational modelling tools. I believe that an integrative understanding of human intrinsic motivation can address acute societal challenges, such as social media addiction and AI alignment.

My research has among others been featured in the German TV-show SWR Science Talk, in the newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung, and in the podcast Behind the Screens.