Hannes Rosenbusch

Tilburg University | UVT · Department of Social Psychology

The current work estimated the relative importance of joke and audience characteristics for the occurrence of amusement. Much psychological research has focused on stimulus characteristics when searching for sources of funniness. Some researchers have instead highlighted the importance of perceiver characteristics, such as dispositional cheerfulnes...

People use clothing to make personality inferences about others, and these inferences steer social behaviors. The current work makes four contributions to the measurement and prediction of clothing-based person perception: first, we integrate published research and open-ended responses to identify common psychological inferences made from clothes (...

Prosociality (measured with economic games) is correlated with individual differences in psychological constructs (measured with self-report scales). We review how methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of computer science focused on processing natural text, can be applied to understand the semantic content of scales measuring p...

Online discussions about politics and current events play a growing role in public life, and they can foster positive outcomes (e.g., civic engagement and political participation) and negative outcomes (e.g., hostility and polarization). The present research examines how the use of doubtful (vs. confident) language influences behavior in online dis...

Machine learning methods for prediction and pattern detection are increasingly prevalent in psychological research. We provide an introductory overview of machine learning, its applications, and describe how to implement models for research. We review fundamental concepts of machine learning, such as prediction accuracy and out‐of‐sample evaluation...

How do expressions of doubt affect trust in online reviews? Some previous studies find that people trust confident advisors more than doubtful advisors, whereas others find doubtful advisors are trusted more. We tested the effects of expressing doubt using Yelp data and in a controlled experiment: In Study 1, reviews from Yelp (N = 5.9 million) wer...

To what extent are intergroup attitudes associated with regional differences in online aggression and hostility? We test whether regional attitude biases towards minorities and their local variability (i.e. intraregional polarization) independently predict verbal hostility on social media. We measure online hostility using large US American samples...

Sometimes interesting statistical findings are produced by a small number of “lucky” data points within the tested sample. To address this issue, researchers and reviewers are encouraged to investigate outliers and influential data points. Here, we present StatBreak, an easy-to-apply method, based on a genetic algorithm, that identifies the observa...

Background. The amount of random chance involved in multiplayer competitions varies depending on the structure of the competition. A hugely popular mode of competition is the Battle Royale, in which a group of participants semi-randomly encounters and battles each other until only one player is left. We utilized computer simulations to investigate...

We review online activism and its relations with offline collective action. Social media facilitate online activism, particularly by documenting and collating individual experiences, community building, norm formation, and development of shared realities. In theory, online activism could hinder offline protests, but empirical evidence for slacktivi...

Psychological measurement and theory are afflicted with an ongoing proliferation of new constructs and scales. Given the often redundant nature of new scales, psychological science is struggling with arbitrary measurement, construct dilution, and disconnection between research groups. To address these issues, we introduce an easy-to-use online appl...

Machine learning methods for pattern detection and prediction are increasingly prevalent in psychological research. We provide a comprehensive overview of machine learning, its applications, and how to implement models for research. We review fundamental concepts of machine learning, such as prediction accuracy and out-of-sample evaluation, and sum...

How do expressions of doubt affect trust in online reviews? Previous research leads to conflicting predictions: some studies find that people trust confident advisors more than doubtful advisors, whereas others find doubtful advisors are trusted more, especially when advisors have salient conflicts-of-interest. We tested the effects of doubt in the...

Why do connected users in online social networks express similar emotions? Past approaches have suggested situational emotion transfers (i.e., contagion) and the phenomenon that emotionally similar users flock together (i.e., homophily). We analyze these mechanisms in unison by exploiting the hierarchical structure of YouTube through multilevel ana...