Tania Singer

Tania Singer (born 1969) is Director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. Her research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behaviour^[1] and empathy.^[2] Singer's Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion, Between Scientists, Economists, and the Dalai Lama was published in 2015.^[3] She is the daughter of the neuroscientist Wolf Singer. In her role as an institute director, she has been involved in a bullying scandal,^[4][5] in which she was accused of bullying and intimidating her employees.

Education and academic career

Singer studied psychology at the Philipps University of Marburg from 1989 to 1992. From 1992 to 1996 she studied psychology, media psychology and media counselling at the Technical University of Berlin, graduating with a M.S. (German: Diplom) in 1996. Between 1996 and 2000, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. After receiving her PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 2000, she continued to work at the Max Planck Institute as a research scientist at the Center for Lifespan Psychology. After a period spent working first at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience and then at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London, UK, she moved to the University of Zurich, Switzerland, as an assistant professor. From 2007 to 2009, she was co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research and in 2008 she held the Inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich. In 2010 she became Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. In 2011, she received an honorary professorship from the University of Leipzig, Germany, and the Humboldt University, Berlin. She is also an honorary research fellow at the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research at the University of Zurich.

Research focus

Tania Singer's work examines human social behaviour using an interdisciplinary approach. In particular, her work focuses on social cognition, social moral emotions such as empathy, compassion, envy and fairness, social decision making, and communication. She is interested in the determinants of cooperation and prosocial behavior as well as the breakdown of cooperation and the emergence of selfish behaviour. Her research uses a range of methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging, virtual reality environments, biological markers such as cortisol, and behavioural studies.^[6]

Singer is a directors board member at the Mind and Life Institute^[7] and has worked with the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard to investigate brain activity during meditation.^[2]

Since 2013 she is the principal investigator of the ReSource Project on neural plasticity after mental training.^[8] She investigates with a longitudinal design whether mental training has neural, behavioral, and hormonal effects and whether the subjective well-being and health is changed in participants.

Another research focus is on how social cognition and motivations can explain human social interaction and human economic decision making. The new research programme, funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in cooperation with Professor Dennis J. Snower, president of the Kiel Institute of World Economy, explores new avenues of how psychological and neuroscientific knowledge about human motivation, emotion, and social cognition can inform models of economic decision making in addressing global economic problems.^[9][10]

In a paper published in the journal Science in 2004, Singer showed that some pain-sensitive regions of the brain were also activated when volunteers experienced their partners feeling pain.^[11] In follow-up studies, published in the journals Nature and Neuron, she showed that empathy-related brain responses are influenced by the perceived fairness of others, and whether a target belonged to an ingroup or outgroup, respectively.^[12]

Controversy

In August 2018 media reported that Singer bullied and intimidated her employees for several years.^[4][5] Singer was reported to exhibit particularly difficult behaviour: to yell or scream at employees, to intimidate them in group meetings, and discriminate against pregnant women (e.g., medical appointments were not allowed during office hours). Difficulties were brought up during a meeting with the scientific advisory board in February 2017 as a part of the institute evaluation. As a consequence, six meetings with a mediator in the first half of 2017 took place. Subsequently, Singer asked for a 1-year sabbatical and a temporary replacement of the Department head, to which the Max-Planck-Society agreed. It is planned to separate Singer from her current colleagues in Leipzig so that they could finish their projects while she will run a smaller research group for 2 or 3 years in Berlin.

Later that month BuzzFeed News, which had previously run a story on similar bullying allegations against Singer's Max Planck colleague Guinevere Kauffmann, reported that employees and graduate students felt the institute's response to the allegations had been, while visible, largely superficial. They noted that as a condition of concluding the matter they were required to sign an agreement that Singer would be notified about not only the content of any article they submitted to journals for publication, despite their allegations that she had tried to retaliate against them for their complaints by removing their authorship even from papers where they had been the primary researcher, and that she wanted them to talk to her before talking to any journalists.^[13]

Staffers also alleged scientific misconduct on Singer's part. They said she had pressured them to omit data from results that conflicted with or disproved hypotheses that they believed she had decided on before the research even began. The Max Planck Society told BuzzFeed that their investigation had found no evidence of that happening.^[13]

Awards and selected memberships

• 2000: Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society
• 2011: Honorary Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research at the University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Since 2014: Vicepresident of the Board, Mind & Life Europe, Zurich, Switzerland
• Since 2013: Member, Young Academy of Europe (YAE), Europa
• Since 2012: Board Member, Mind & Life Institute (MLI), Hadley, MA, USA
• Since 2011: Member, European Initiative for Integrative Psychological Science, Association for Psychological Science (APS)

Publications

A complete publication list of Tania Singer can be found on her website.^[14]

References

External links

• Tania singer’s homepage at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
• Website on the ReSource Project, a longitudinal study on mental training
• Website on the research topic "Caring Economics" together with Prof. Dennis J. Snower
• Website with download link on the free eBook "Compassion. Bridging Practice and Science"