Siegmar Otto

• Professor
• University of Hohenheim

In software-engineering research, many empirical studies are conducted with open-source or industry developers. However, in contrast to other research communities like economics or psychology, only few experiments use financial incentives ( i.e ., paying money) as a strategy to motivate participants’ behavior and reward their performance. The most...

The rapid advancement and integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into various aspects of human life necessitates understanding individual differences in attitudes towards AI. Typically, the Big Five has been applied to explore these individual differences; however, this model may overlook a critical dimension related to ethical AI use: Honesty...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly influential, raising both high hopes and severe concerns. This implies the existence of individually diverse attitudes, which makes AI attitude an important scientific construct. But attitudes toward AI – contrary to attitudes toward most other objects – are quite special because AI as the objec...

The imperative for pro-environmental behavior is growing globally, with green advertising encouraging sustainable choices. However, acting pro-environmentally often comes with negative monetary or behavioral consequences for individuals (i.e. costs). Because using a foreign language (vs. native language) changes how people make decisions, language...

Addressing climate change at the individual level and the associated conflict between self-interest and the common good is viewed primarily as a motivational challenge in the environmental domain. However, due to this conflict, climate change mitigation has also been framed as a classical social dilemma that requires direct, overt cooperation with...

For many employees, the COVID-19 pandemic-related policies triggered concerns about job security. At the same time, companies in many countries made greater use of state-financed short-time work (i.e., where employees could keep their jobs, work less or not at all, and still receive a substantial surrogate wage). Even though such a measure certainl...

Die Förderung der digitalisierungsbezogenen Kompetenzen von (angehenden) Lehrkräften ist entscheidend, um Schüler*innen als mündige Bürger*innen die Teilhabe in der digitalen Welt zu ermöglichen. Lehrkräfte müssen ihrerseits die Potenziale digitaler Technologien erkennen und über die erforderlichen Kompetenzen verfügen, um die damit verbundenen Her...

AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in creative fields that were thought to be exclusively human. Thus, it is non-surprising that a negative bias toward AI-generated artwork has been proclaimed. However, results are mixed. Studies that have presented AI-generated and human-created images simultaneously have detected a bias, but most studies in wh...

Context Empirical studies with human participants (e.g., controlled experiments) are established methods in Software Engineering (SE) research to understand developers’ activities or the pros and cons of a technique, tool, or practice. Various guidelines and recommendations on designing and conducting different types of empirical studies in SE exis...

Warum nutzen Konsument:innen additiv oder substitutiv nachhaltige Dienstleistungen? Die Entscheidung für nachhaltige Dienstleistungen wird durch das Zusammenspiel von individueller Nachhaltigkeitsmotivation und Verhaltenskosten, wie höhere Preise, Rechercheaufwand oder längere Wege determiniert. Dabei kompensiert eine hohe Nachhaltigkeitsmotivation...

This article in the journal “Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation (GIO)” addresses the twin transition – the simultaneous transition to a more sustainable and digitalized society – in the intra-organizational context and asks how using digital technologies can promote employee green behavior (EGB). Since EGB in an intra-organizational context is often...

This article in the journal “Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation (GIO)” addresses the twin transition—the simultaneous transition to a more sustainable and digitalized society—in organizations and asks how using digital technologies can promote employee green behavior (EGB). Since EGB in an intra-organizational context is often based on psychological...

When thinking about algorithms, cold lines of code and purely rational decisions may come to mind. However, this picture is incomplete. Numerous examples illustrate how human aspects shape algorithmic output (e.g., via biased training data). This study delves into how developers’ and users’ individual differences can influence algorithmic output, f...

Soil stewardship has emerged as a guiding principle shaping the conservation practices adopted by agricultural stakeholders on their lands. Some scholars have advocated a holistic perspective on stewardship, contending that it relies on both “care” and “knowledge”. Our study sought to investigate the degree to which agricultural stakeholders' knowl...

Call for Papers for a special issue in Employee Relations on the topic of "Managing the Twin Transformation: Driving Sustainability and Digitalisation in Organisations"

Attaining sustainable agriculture requires acknowledging the impact of human behavior. Despite the pivotal role of soils in agriculture, our understanding of the psychological drivers that motivate farmers to adopt soil conservation practices remains limited. Our objective was to explore the influence of soil science knowledge and connection to soi...

Studies indicate that young people are more prepared to engage in pro-environmental behavior if they are interested in nature and recognize it as worthy of protection. However, a reliable instrument to measure adolescents’ interest in nature is still lacking. Therefore, we developed a new metric, the Scale of Interest in Nature (SIN). It consists o...

Increasingly autonomous robots become more and more prevalent in daily life and their proximity to humans may affecthuman well-being and comfort. Consequently, researchers have begun to study the effect of robotic presence on humansand to establish distance rules. However, studies on human-robot proxemics rely on various concepts (e.g. safety, comf...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, contact tracing apps such as the German Corona-Warning-App (CWA) were introduced to facilitate contact tracing of infected individuals with the aim of breaking chains of infection. Therefore, using a contact tracing app is beneficial to society as a whole. Even though this is a good cause, the rather reluctant use of t...

Autonomous robots of different kinds become more and more salient in our everyday life and because the spatial proximity of robots has an effect on the well-being of humans, researchers try to find and give appropriate guidelines regarding spatial proximity. In doing so, these studies rely on a few different concepts (e.g., safety or comfort) and o...

Studies indicate that young people are prepared to act with sustainable and environmental awareness only if they are interested in nature and recognize it as worthy of protection. However, a reliable instrument to measure adolescents’ interest in nature is still lacking. Therefore, we developed a new metric, the Scale of Interest in Nature (SIN). I...

Face-to-face meetings are often preferred over other forms of communication because meeting in person provides the “richest” way to communicate. Face-to-face meetings are so rich because many ways of communicating (spoken language and nonverbal cues) are available to support mutual understanding. With the progress of digitization and driven by the...

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has become a key concept to achieve global sustainable development. ESD aims at enabling people to think and act in a sustainable, future-oriented manner. For this purpose, ESD should not only equip learners with knowledge but is supposed to promote and advance the acquisition of sustainability competenci...

Although both altruistic and ecological behaviors can be considered prosocially driven behaviors, our psychological understanding of what motivates action in either the human or ecological domains is still in its infancy. We aimed to assess connection to nature and connection to humans as mediators of the relationship between prosocial propensity a...

Empirical studies in software engineering are often conducted with open-source developers or in industrial collaborations. Seemingly, this resulted in few experiments using financial incentives (e.g., money, vouchers) as a strategy to motivate the participants' behavior; which is typically done in other research communities, such as economics or ps...

ABSTRACT The concept of attitude toward soil is emerging, with a slim choice of scales available to collect hard data. There is also a dearth of standard scales to acquire precise data on students’ knowledge of soil. Therefore, the objectives of the present study were: (1) to devise appropriate scales to quantify theoretical soil knowledge and atti...

Job satisfaction helps create a committed workforce with many positive effects, such as increased organisational citizenship behaviour and reduced absenteeism. In turn, job satisfaction can be increased through gratifications, such as wage increases and promotions. But human satisfaction is prone to being governed by the homeostatic principle and w...

Biases in algorithmic systems tend to discriminate against certain user groups. In order to ensure that the decisions made by these systems are fair, it is necessary to understand how biases in human cognition and language find their way into a system and affect user perception. In this study, we examined the emergence of such biases in the develop...

Prior research has focused on individual difference variables that predict various prosocial behaviors. This work, however, has neglected to consider the underlying commonalities between the different domains behavior can be performed. In line with other authors we propose that individual difference factors can indicate one’s propensity toward acti...

A shift towards a bioeconomy is not sustainable per se. In order to contribute to sustainable development, a bioeconomy must meet certain conditions. These conditions have been discussed with respect to technology and also to the importance of ethical aspects. Consumers’ behavior has also been acknowledged. However, consumers still have to choose s...

Prosociality (caring for one another) has been identified as a correlate of pro-environmental behavior. While our study affirmed the role of the Catholic Church in teaching prosociality, it did not reveal any direct link between Catholic identity and pro-environmental behavior. By incorporating environmental education into its teaching, the Catholi...

Previous research has shown that biospheric, altruistic, and egoistic values explain more variance in proenvironmental behavior than explained by the self-determined motivation that is linked to such behavior (i.e. motivation fueled by the fulfilment of basic psychological needs). However, these findings might stem from the relatively narrow measur...

Behavioral spillover is the phenomenon when a behavior change is accompanied by subsequent changes in other behaviors related to the same goal (e.g., environmental protection). We propose to understand behavioral spillover as the result of attitude change. According to the Campbell Paradigm (see Kaiser, Byrka, & Hartig, 2010), pro-environmental beh...

For scholars and policy-makers alike, deeper learning has been a promising paradigm for fostering students’ interest in and mastery of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Deeper learning is assumed to result in a more thorough understanding of a subject that endures the test of time. To reach this level, a fascination with the...

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translate...

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translate...

Environmental attitude and behavior are at the roots of a sustainable future, yet little is known about their developmental origins in early childhood. This longitudinal study is the first to examine how children’s environmental attitude and behavior develop throughout childhood (ages 7 to 18, N = 118). Environmental attitude and behavior form arou...

In order to foster e-waste recycling, it is necessary to identify the factors that affect consumers’ recycling of e-waste and to determine the degree to which these factors influence recycling behavior. We propose that environmental motivation and behavioral costs are the two determinants of e-waste recycling, but only behavioral costs can be manip...

Vor dem Hintergrund des Klimawandels wird eine Reduktion des Energiekonsums über Effizienzmaßnahmen angestrebt. Allerdings werden die Effizienzgewinne durch zusätzlichen Konsum oft zum großen Teil wieder aufgefressen – dem Rebound. Nur wenn Konsumenten auf diesen zusätzlichen Konsum verzichten und generell sparsamer mit Energie umgehen, kann die En...

Geogames are mobile, location-based and location dependent games for devices like smartphones and tablets. As geogames are played outdoors they offer various possibilities for environmental education. The geogame entitled FindeVielfalt Simulation is a location dependent game, developed in the BioDiv2Go project, which provides sensory experiences, d...

Environmental education programs neglect the aspect of prosocial behavior as a correlate of pro-environmental behavior. This article examines the possible benefits of increasing the emphasis on prosocial behavior as a way to reinforce environmental education. In our study, prosocial behavior was positively related to pro-environmental behavior (r =...

The behavioral sciences, including most of psychology, seek to explain and predict behavior with the help of theories and models that involve concepts (e.g., attitudes) that are subsequently translated into measures. Currently, some subdisciplines such as social psychology focus almost exclusively on measures that demand reflection or even introspe...

Prospective, longitudinal analyses revealed that over a 12-year period from ages 6 to 18, individuals who grew up with mothers with more proenvironmental attitudes engaged in more proenvironmental behavior as young adults. A similar marginal association was uncovered between mothers’ proenvironmental behaviors and the proenvironmental behavior of t...

This paper examines the nature of the link between mindfulness and ecological behavior. Based on the notion that mindfulness incorporates heightened awareness of bodily sensations, we suggest an indirect path from mindfulness to ecological behavior that is mediated through individual health behavior, such as improved nutrition and increased exercis...

The promotion of environmental knowledge is viewed as a fundamental component of environmental education and a necessary prerequisite to ecological behaviour; however, it has little effect on actual behaviour. Nature-based environmental education, which combines the acquisition of environmental knowledge with the promotion of an intrinsic driver, n...

In der Naturbewusstseinsstudie 2011 „werden unter Naturbewusstsein subjektive Auffassungen von Natur und Einstellungen zur Natur gefasst“ (Kleinhückelkotten/Neitzke 2012: 6). Diese von der Person ausgehende individuelle Perspektive entspricht dem Einstellungskonzept der Psychologie. Doch was sind Einstellungen genau? Wie kann man sie messen? Und wa...

Zusammenfassung. Politisches Wissen der Bürgerinnen und Bürger gilt als wesentlich für die Handlungsfähigkeit einer Demokratie und wird intensiv erforscht. Derzeit liegt jedoch kein Messinstrument vor, das theoretisch hergeleitet relevante Dimensionen des politischen Wissens diagnostiziert und frei für Forschungszwecke verfügbar ist. Wir entwickelt...

Der Beitrag ist mit der Bedeutung des Geldes in der Psychologie befasst. Hierzu werden die Rolle der Wahrnehmung und die Bedeutung von Geld für das persönliche Glück und die individuelle Zufriedenheit erörtert. Es wird diskutiert, ob Geld das individuelle Verhalten anderen gegenüber und sogar das eigene Befinden verändert. Dabei zeigt sich, dass di...

Personal and political action on climate change is traditionally thought to be motivated by people accepting its reality and importance. However, convincing the public that climate change is real faces powerful ideological obstacles 1–4 , and climate change is slipping in public importance in many countries 5,6. Here we investigate a diierent appro...

An effective program of environmental education requires the identification of the knowledge that must be imparted. This paper compares the effects of human-environment system knowledge (i.e., knowledge related to environmental problems caused by humans) and environmental action knowledge (i.e., knowledge of possible courses of action to reduce hum...

Personal and political action on climate change is traditionally thought to be motivated by people accepting its reality and importance. However, convincing the public that climate change is real faces powerful ideological obstacles1–4, and climate change is slipping in public importance in many countries5,6. Here we investigate a di�erent approach...

When researchers fail to control for confounding factors, the causes of behavior can be more apparent than real, even in experimental research. The current study replicates an experiment by Weinstein, Przybylski, and Ryan (2009) with the goal of demonstrating that their main finding could have resulted from differences in people's prosocial propens...

The effects of income on environmentally significant behavior (i.e., behavior that does have an effect on the environment, such as traveling and waste disposal) have been strong but equivocal. The relation between knowledge and environmentally significant behavior has attracted even greater interest, but relations have been weak and explanations di...

The positive relation between age and ecological behavior is virtually unchallenged and widely corroborated. Nevertheless, there is no theoretical account in the literature to explain why people engage in environmental protection at higher levels as their lives progress. However, knowing the origins of behavior change—amendment in particular—is cru...

A better understanding of when and why nudges (e.g., defaults, visibility or accessibility alterations) and other structural behavior-change measures work or fail can help avoid subsequent surprises such as unexpected political opposition. In this paper, we challenge the unilateral focus on structural interventions-which seemingly control people's...

For many societies, the prime political strategy for mitigating climate change has been to improve the efficiency of technology (e.g., cars, light bulbs, and refrigerators). However, World Bank data suggest that the per-capita energy consumption of societies is leveling off rather than falling. Thus, all efficiency gains are apparently eaten up by...

Abstract: In this paper we present a new scale for the assessment of environmental knowledge in the Latin American Region (EKLA) based on the Rasch model. The scale was validated within two Latin American samples (Argentina, N = 168 and Colombia, N = 130). Comparing the level of environmental knowledge in both countries, the general prevalence of e...

Technologische Effizienzsteigerungen zur Reduktion des Energieverbrauchs (z.B. bei Autos, Kühlschränken oder Beleuchtung) sind die zentrale politische Strategie, wenn es um Klimaschutz geht. Trotz deutlicher Effizienzsteigerungen zeigt ein Blick auf die Pro-Kopf Verbrauchsdaten der Weltbank jedoch, dass der Energieverbrauch in Industrienationen nic...

Die Energiewende allein mit Effizienzmaßnahmen einzuleiten, ist wenig erfolgversprechend. Vielmehr bedarf es einer gesamtgesellschaftlichen Bereitschaft, das Streben nach persönlichem Wohlstand zu begrenzen. Die Psychologie kann hier Wege aufzeigen, die zu einem nachhaltigen Lebensstil motivieren.

Der Utopia City-Guide ist ein internetbasiertes bundesweites Branchenbuch für nachhaltige Produkte und Dienstleistungen. Welche Chancen und Risiken sind mit der Einführung des Branchenbuches verbunden?

What is the meaning of the terms sustainable development and sustainability? Although both terms have general positive connotation, thereremains a difference between the connotation of sustainable development and sustainability. These differences are particularly true for people that do not know the terms.

Paper zu Arbeitspaket 12 „Konsumenten- und kundennahe Ressourcenpolitikoptionen“ des Projekts „Materialeffizienz und Ressourcenschonung“ (MaRess); Projekt im Auftrag des BMU und UBA; siehe auch: https://epub.wupperinst.org/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/4336/file/MaRess_AP12_4.pdf

Die Anforderungen an Arbeitnehmer verändern sich immer schneller. Bisher wurden die passenden Menschen ausgewählt, weil das Angebot groß genug war. Aber diese Strategie geht kaum noch auf. Deshalb beginnt ein Umdenken, hin zu einer gezielten Integrationsleistung in der Personalentwicklung.

Zusammenfassung. TV-Zuschauer/innen, die bislang Umwelt- und Nachhaltigkeits-Themen gegenuber resistent waren, sollen mithilfe des Ecotainment-Konzeptes erreicht werden. Dieses erfordert eine positive Auseinandersetzung auf kognitiv-emotionaler Ebene. Um TV-Beitrage zum Thema Nachhaltigkeit im Hinblick auf ihr kognitives und emotionales Wirkungspot...

Today, leisure mobility accounts for about 50% of the yearly distance travelled by people in developed countries. Therefore, leisure mobility plays a decisive role in overall reduction of emissions from the transport sector. There is a need for policy-makers and scientists to better understand the drivers behind this type of mobility. Leisure mobil...