At the heart of the master’s concentration in psychological analysis of social dynamics (PSAD) is the scientific analysis of social processes that can explain the development of individuals, dyadic relationships, groups and large social networks. Based on theoretical knowledge of how social systems work and state-of-the-art methods for collecting and analysing dynamic data, students are taught to find solutions to complex social challenges, e.g.:

• How do individuals develop in complex and rapidly changing social environments, e.g. in terms of loneliness, resilience, teamwork and intercultural competence?
• How do sustainably satisfying social relationships function, e.g. private (friendships, romantic relationships) and professional relationships (work and counselling relationships)?
• What characterises optimally functioning groups and organisations, e.g. project teams, negotiating groups, political committees and entire workforces?
• How can social developments be made tangible and influenced with psychological concepts and methods, e.g. overcoming societal divides, integrating immigrants more successfully, or responding sustainably to global crises (climate change, pandemics)?

The modules with their interactive courses and projects in this concentration are supervised by a team of instructors from various psychological disciplines, specifically Prof. Mitja Back from the research group Psychological Assessment and Personality Psychology, Prof. Gerald Echterhoff from Social Psychology, Prof. Steffen Nestler from Statistics and Methods, Prof. Carmen Binnewies from Work Psychology, Prof. Carola Grunschel from Educational Psychology and Prof. Joscha Kärtner from Developmental Psychology.

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Click here to view the PowerPoint slides presented at the PASD Zoom info event on 25 May 2023.

• For whom is this concentration intended?

  The PSAD concentration is ideal for you, if ...

  • you are interested in how people, groups and societies influence each other and constantly change.
  • you have a desire to immerse yourself in the modern research field of social dynamics because you are excited about current trends in psychology.
  • you have an affinity for psychological methods and statistics and seek to learn state-of-the-art techniques for collecting and analysing complex data.
  • it is important to you to be able to take an informed perspective on current social phenomena and to actively solve social challenges.
  • you are committed and open to new challenges and can work productively both in a team and independently.

• What career prospects does the PASD concentration offer?

  For graduates of this master’s concentration, the acquired methodological, content-related, and communicative expertise opens up career prospects in a wide range of future-oriented fields:

  • Academic career: The concentration allows you to professionally specialise in almost every discipline of psychology. Due to its considerable depth and the broad expertise graduates attain with regard to modern methods and the integrative analysis of complex phenomena, the master’s concentration makes you competitive candidate for a doctoral programme and can put you on the path to an academic career at excellent universities and non-university research institutions.
  • Participation in a start-up or work as a start-up consultant: As a graduate of this concentration and on account to your profound understanding of social dynamics, you are well-prepared to solve concrete problems in the everyday life of individuals or teams. In a large and rapidly growing market of social and health-related services in the form of apps, websites and wearables etc., you can offer valuable consulting services to emerging companies or develop your own idea for a start-up yourself.
  • Data scientist in companies and institutions: As a data scientist, your job would be to make large amounts of data (psychologically) usable. Based on your extensive statistical skills, you can help institutions process and analyse data in an automated way, generate unique insights and derive target-oriented strategies from them. For example, you can help optimise the efficiency of work processes, personnel policies or advertising strategies for products.
  • Organisational consulting: Large public and private organisations need to be able to understand, analyse and influence social dynamics in two ways. First, organisations themselves represent complex networks of individuals, dyads, and groups whose selection, training, and efficient interaction determine their success. You will be able to analyse the situation of even complex organisations and to generate and evaluate evidence-based strategies of person-job fit, personnel selection and development. Second, organisations develop products and offers that have to compete socially in large and easily accessible markets full of competing products and offers. Be it food, educational offers, fitness tools, insurance policies or health prevention and intervention programme: Your knowledge of different social motives, of the mutual influence in dyadic relationships, friend and work groups, and of the development of everyday interests and habits in social networks will allow you to develop optimal organisational strategies and to verify their success.
  • Training and consulting leaders and teachers: The ability to quickly recognise group dynamics is a valuable skill when coaching individuals responsible for project teams, departments or entire organisations. In the context of personnel development, you can guide managers to recognise and resolve points of friction among employees. With your support, managers learn how to create a genuine team spirit and thereby ensure a pleasant and productive working atmosphere, and to support their employees in a targeted manner and encourage their personal development. In the same way, you can train teachers how to deal effectively with the social dynamics within their classes, or school directors within their teaching staff.
  • Consulting political institutions: Probably more than any other field, politics is characterised by a multitude of interests and actors that are interrelated in complex ways. With a sense for the psychological dynamics in such systems and their interplay with societal processes, you will become a highly sought-after consultant for political parties, associations, foundations, governmental and non-governmental organisations.
  • Diversity management: For both public institutions and business enterprises, diversity is of central importance today. With a sharp eye for the potentials of interpersonal diversity, but also for the risks of social exclusion, you as a graduate of this concentration can contribute to the development and implementation of successful diversity strategies. Your content-related and communication skills, as well as your methodological skill set will enable you to design, evaluate, and optimise measures to increase and benefit from diversity.
  • Digitalisation: Digitalisation represents a major challenge and opportunity for organisations of all kinds. This is because digitalisation changes environments in which individuals, groups and organisations operate and in turn, the daily demands they face. Based on your expertise in dynamic processes between individuals and environments, you will be able to shape organisation-wide digitalisation processes in a goal-oriented manner and identify opportunities within individuals and environments to reduce hurdles and to make optimal use of their existing potentials.
  • Do your own thing: You aren’t exactly sure which profession you would like to pursue? Whatever path you take, this concentration will optimally prepare you for the challenges in a complex time. Whether you end up working with technology and numbers or rather interacting with other people, as a graduate of this master's concentration, you will be able to identify and solve problems. On this basis, you will be able to profitably engage and achieve success in a wide variety of potential occupations.

• Our teaching concept

  We instructors are convinced that research, teaching and application can go hand in hand and that the best insights and solutions are gained in teams. Accordingly, we use a wide range of different teaching methods which are designed to conduct research, to learn, and to develop solutions in interaction with one another. As a student, you are an active and equal partner in this process.

  Current theoretical and empirical findings and state-of-the-art methods are professionally prepared, communicated via various teaching formats and enlarged on by means of video and case studies as well as practical exercises on real-world problems and data. As a student, you will become an expert who can directly apply your newly gained insights. We leave plenty of room for open debate and stimulating discussions. Courses are also a place for us instructors to learn new things and to develop creative concepts and methods together with students. In small group projects, students work on their own questions and develop their own research and practical solutions. The results of these projects are discussed intensively and presented in joint events, for example, as a pitch.

  As a student, you will also gain direct insights into research laboratories, national and international scientific networks and transfer projects of the participating work units from the very start. Consequently, you will be able to participate in cutting-edge scientific work, discoveries and developments. With your own master thesis in combination with challenging national and international internships, you as a student of this concentration will lay the foundation for a successful career in and outside of academia.

• Our teaching content

  The PASD concentration combines three key elements of instruction: (1) acquiring theoretical knowledge of dynamic social systems, (2) learning about and applying state-of-the-art methods for collecting and analysing dynamic data, and (3) developing practical solutions to complex social challenges in everyday life.

  The first key element involves teaching the theories and concepts that will equip you to accurately describe and think through the dynamics of complex social systems. This will enable you to take a professional and integrative perspective on the central social phenomena of our time. In this context, the distinction between different levels of investigation (individual vs. dyad vs. group) plays an important role, as does the distinction between different temporal resolutions (short-, medium- and long-term changes) and the identification of relevant contextual factors (within individuals and environments). In-depth theoretical knowledge and current empirical research findings are provided on key processes (social motivation, interaction behaviour, interpersonal cognition and emotion regulation, social cognition and communication) that explain how individuals, dyads and groups differ, influence each other and evolve over time.

  The second key element is the empirical assessment and analysis of social dynamics. In interactive seminars, you will learn about numerous ways to collect complex longitudinal data. Techniques and tools are not only presented theoretically, but also tested practically; these range from continuous video-based assessments of interpersonal behaviour and communication patterns in the laboratory to event-based smartphone surveys. At the same time, you will learn how to analyse the resulting data using the latest statistical methods, to formalise theoretical concepts mathematically, and to develop predictive models.

  The third key element of the concentration is a solution-oriented perspective on complex social challenges. Through practical exercises, discussions, video examples, group work and projects, you will develop solutions to concrete problems that arise in various areas of life, applying your acquired knowledge on social dynamics. This will enable you to develop starting points for change processes, ranging from changing individual everyday habits to reducing polarised discourse in social networks. By means of these everyday examples as well as their practical relevance, we enable you to generate evidence-based solutions for important scientific and practical challenges and to successfully communicate them to target groups.

• Our modules and courses

  The content of the PASD concentration is taught in three modules of the MSc Psychology programme: modules F, G, and H. For an overview of the programme’s structure, click here.

  Module F (Foundations of Dynamic Social Systems) teaches the conceptual and methodological foundations for analysing dynamic social systems and applying them to various applications and data contexts. The module consists of two lectures.

  1. In the lecture "Theory and Empiricism of Social Dynamics", individuals, dyads and groups are introduced as nested social systems that mutually influence and develop over time, the most important social processes involved in these developments are elaborated, and an overview of relevant application contexts and problems is given.
  2. In the lecture "Statistical Analysis of Social Dynamics", recent methods for statistical modelling of complex psychological data are introduced which may arise in the cross-sectional but especially longitudinal study of individuals, dyads and/or groups. Univariate and multivariate mixed linear models and multilevel structural equation models are discussed among other things. The use of suitable statistical software is presented and tested by our own practical examples.

  In Module G, we deal with dynamic social changes and the social processes underlying these changes. In each of the three seminars in this module, we focus on a specific type of social dynamic and, to this end, students gain methodological knowledge of specific forms of data collection and data analysis.

  1. The seminar "Dynamics in Interaction Behaviour" focuses on the understanding, video-based recording and analysis of interaction behaviour within specific social situations.
  2. In the seminar "Dynamics in Social Cognition and Communication", the analysis of processes of social motivation, perception, emotion and cognition, especially in experimental contexts, is examined in detail in relation to different interaction and communication contexts.
  3. In the seminar "Dynamics in Everyday Experience", we deal with the theory, smartphone-based recording and analysis of everyday social behaviour and experience dynamics. These dynamics include variations from situation to situation, day to day, and week to week.

  The three seminars in Module H aim to enable student to apply theoretical knowledge and methodological skills to concrete social challenges. Students are given in-depth knowledge on individual (seminar "Individual Change"), dyadic (seminar "Dyadic Changes") and group-related level (seminar "Changes in Social Networks") prevention, intervention and training concepts. The targeted assessment of social dynamics and their targeted influence are practiced in the students’ own projects. A central goal of the three seminars is to impart analytical and practical competence in the application of scientific methods to complex problems and in the communicative preparation appropriate to different target groups.

  In addition to these modules, student attain important in-depth diagnostic and statistical skills in Modules A and B, which we will build on in this concentration.

  In Module C, students have the opportunity to supplement content from the other two concentrations ("Personnel & Business Psychology (PWP)" and "Learning, Development, Counselling (LEB)") in two lectures and to expand their methodological expertise according to their own interests in the seminar "Individual Deepening". There is the possibility to take one of the three TechLab courses (Data Science in R or Python; Artificial Intelligence in Python) or a course on advanced programming in R.

  In Module D, students delve deeper into content related to science communication, pursue their own research project as part of their master’s thesis, and present and discuss it in the research colloquium. The master’s thesis can be written on any number of topics. It is integrated into current research projects and supervised by at least one of the research units involved in the concentration.

•  How can I benefit from the PASD concentration?

   As a student of the PASD concentration, you will acquire the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary to theoretically understand, empirically analyse and practically solve complex social problems. As a graduate, you will be able to...

  • analyse differences between individuals, dyads and groups and their development in a cross-disciplinary manner.
  • accurately select and apply modern methods of data collection and statistical data analysis.
  • provide evidence-based answers to complex questions.
  • develop practical solutions to complex social problems.
  • communicate scientific findings and scientifically sound transfer solutions effectively to the public, media, corporate managers and policymakers.

  With these skills, you will be excellently qualified for challenging positions in a broad range of modern professional fields. You will also be well prepared for future challenges and opportunities in a rapidly evolving professional market for psychologists.

• What do graduates and former employees of the PSAD concentration do today?

  Various people recommend the concentration in Psychological Analysis of Social Dynamics (PSAD) to prospective psychologists:

  • Albrecht Küfner - team leader for employee surveys at Deutsche Bahn
  • Cécile Schain - psychologist at the Federal Employment Agency
  • Ina Mielke - research assistant at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf
  • Jana Mattern - HR developer with a focus on talent management at a German medium-sized company
  • Julia Krüger - research assistant at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg
  • Lisa Niemeyer - deputy therapeutic director of the Maßregelvollzugsklinik Schloss Haldem & self-employed evaluator
  • Lucas Kaup - junior psychometrician at ELIGO
  • Marius Leckelt - data science expert for People Analytics at Credit Suisse
  • Michael Grosz - professor at HMU Health and Medical University Potsdam
  • Paula Schweppe - PhD student of human medicine at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen
  • Philipp Sturm - clinical neuropsychologist at the acute care hospital "Christliches Klinikum Unna West"
  • Richard Rau - research associate at the Health and Medical University in Potsdam
  • Roos Hutteman - head of learning design & content management at Cornelsen Verlag
  • Simon Breil - manager of people analytics at BabyOne
  • Sophia - research associate at the TU Braunschweig
  • Tobias Härtel - research associate in business school at the University of Osnabrück