Senior Researcher

Dr. Michael Zürn

As a behavioral scientist, Michael K. Zürn bridges the fields of psychology and economics. He has been working at NIM since 2021 as a senior researcher in the Cognition & Decisions research group. His research generally examines the interplay between judgment and motivation, particularly with regard to consumer decisions.

The theoretical foundation of his work is Social Cognition, which explains human behavior in terms of the underlying psychological processes. In his empirical work, he combines experimental methods rooted in Social Cognition with paradigms developed in the fields of Behavioral and Experimental Economics.

Michael K. Zürn earned his Ph.D. summa cum laude from the University of Würzburg in 2015 under the supervision of Fritz Strack. He subsequently was a postdoctoral researcher at the Social Cognition Center Cologne (SoCCCo) and at the Center for Social and Economic Behavior (C-SEB) at the University of Cologne. His work has been published in leading international journals, including the Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Cognition and Emotion, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Marketing Letters.

 

 

Research Interests

  • Consumer Autonomy

  • Ownership & Identity

  • Evaluation & Comparison

 

Current Projects

  • Artificial Obedience (Consumer Autonomy during the rise of AI)

  • Sustainable Consumption

  • Behavioral Marco-Economics

 

Selected publications

  • Zürn, M. K., & Topolinski, S. (2017). When trust comes easy: Articulatory fluency increases transfers in the trust game. Journal of Economic Psychology, 61, 74–86.
  • Zürn, M. K., Gerten, J., & Topolinski, S. (2021). Maybe Favors: How to get More Good Deeds Done. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
  • Oberwegner, N., Cantner, F., Imschloss, M., & Zürn, M. K. (2025). Unpacking olfactory marketing: initial evidence for the positive effects of scented parcels on post-order consumer responses in e-commerce. Marketing Letters, 36(4), 903-916.
  • Löffler, C. S., Naber, D., Weiger, N., Zürn, M. K., Silva, R. R., Ingendahl, M., & Topolinski, S. (2024). Mood and fluency: The case of pronunciation ease, liking and trust. European Journal of Social Psychology, 54(3), 643-657.
  • Erle, T. M., & Zürn, M. K. (2020). Illusory trust: Kanizsa shapes incidentally increase trust and willingness to invest. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 33(5), 671-682.