Doctoral Researcher (m/f/x) (75%, 48 months)

In order to fill a fixed-term position in part-time (29.87 hours/week = 75%) by October 2026 or later, we are looking for 1

Doctoral Researcher (m/f/x) (75%, 48 months)

We invite applications for a doctoral position as part of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Shifting Mindsets for Sustainable Consumption (SUSCON)” funded by the European Union under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hofmann and located in the Department of Social and Environmental Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology at the Ruhr University Bochum. For more information on our research, please visit https://www.soc.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ Ruhr University Bochum is one of Germany’s leading research universities, offering a collaborative and interdisciplinary research environment on a unified, modern campus. Unsustainable consumption is a key driver of the climate crisis and must be urgently addressed to stay within planetary boundaries. Despite widespread awareness, personal lifestyle changes have proven insufficient and difficult. Rather than relying on individual self-control alone, major structural policy solutions addressing the systemic roots of the social dilemma of unsustainable consumption are needed. Thus, citizens, as well as policymakers, need to become more aware of the significant constraints to sustainable lifestyles and to support and actively promote such policy solutions. This very process is often psychologically hindered by an overemphasis on personal responsibility and an underestimation of the structural forces shaping sustainable behavior. The SUSCON project aims to expose such limitations and the potentials of a “structural mindset” that better recognizes systemic drivers of behavior and supports collective, structural solutions. Drawing on experimental psychology, behavioral economics, political psychology, and AI-based discourse analysis, SUSCON will examine how different mindsets affect cooperation, policy support, and attribution of responsibility in both citizens and policymakers.

The doctoral researcher will work at the intersection of environmental and political psychology and computational text analysis, contributing primarily to Work Package 3.3. This work package applies recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) to sustainability discourse, with the aim of developing theoretically grounded methods for extracting psychologically meaningful signals from political language and linking these patterns to real-world policy outcomes. Beyond model development, the position offers substantial scope for shaping the conceptual and empirical direction of this research line. The position additionally involves contributions to a citizen survey project on policy acceptance and to survey and experimental studies involving policymakers.

Scope: part-time
Duration: fixed-term, 48 month
Start: by October 2026 or later
Apply by: 2026-06-22

Your tasks:

You will work closely with the PI and the broader project team — including two postdoctoral researchers and two doctoral researchers leading complementary work packages — to design, implement, and validate the NLP model. Core responsibilities include compiling and coordinating the annotation of training corpora, fine-tuning the model, training and evaluating classification models, and applying the validated model to archival data. You will furthermore contribute to quantitative analyses linking discourse patterns to policy indicators, as well as to survey-based and experimental components of the project. You will be expected to publish results in peer-reviewed journals and to implement open science practices throughout, including pre-registration and transparent data management.

As a pre-doctoral researcher, it is expected that this position will be used to obtain a doctorate. There is furthermore the possibility of research cooperations within the team, as well as an expectation to contribute to the supervision of a limited number of BA and MA theses. Please note that this position is not suitable for a remote-only arrangement.

Your Profile

We are looking for applicants who bring many of the following qualifications and interests. You do not need to meet all criteria to be considered:

• A Master’s degree in psychology or a closely related field (e.g., political psychology, environmental psychology, behavioral science)


• Interest in political and climate psychology, political discourse, and the psychology of communication; Enthusiasm for the project’s substantive focus on sustainability, structural behavior change, and policy


• A strong foundation in research methods and statistical analysis; experience with quantitative and/or survey-based research designs


• Curiosity about or prior experience with computational approaches to text analysis and a genuine willingness to develop NLP-related skills; prior exposure to Python, R, or machine learning is a plus but not required


• Familiarity with open science practices (e.g., pre-registration, reproducibility)


• Motivation to work in an international, interdisciplinary team that spans psychology and data science


• Strong communication and collaboration skills


• Excellent command of English (written and spoken); Proficiency in German is an advantage given that the project's primary data sources and institutional context are German-language, though later phases may extend to other languages


• Efficient, organized, reliable, and able to work both independently and in a team

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