Dr. Tobias R. Rebholz

How do people make judgments and decisions when the information they rely on is noisy and incomplete—and how is this changing in the age of AI?

Tobias R. Rebholz is an interdisciplinary scholar and open-science enthusiast addressing these questions using methods from statistics, econometrics, machine learning, and behavioral science, including human-computer interaction and artificial cognition experiments. He is currently a DFG-funded Walter Benjamin Fellow and visiting research scholar in the Management and Organizations Area at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Previously, he was a research associate in the Social Cognition and Decision Sciences group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He earned his PhD in 2023 from the DFG-funded Research Training Group Statistical Modeling in Psychology (SMiP)—a transregional collaboration involving the Universities of Mannheim, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Landau, and Tübingen.

Tobias’s research focuses on quantitative methods for behavioral research in social cognition and judgment and decision-making (JDM). A central theme in his current work is quantifying the informational influence of qualitative information—especially that generated by large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—on human JDM. More broadly, he develops and applies advanced statistical models to understand how ecological constraints shape information sampling and utilization. His teaching spans substantive seminars in these areas and methodological courses on applied machine learning, statistical programming, and experimental data analytics. His research has secured more than 150,000 EUR in competitive funding and has been published in prestigious outlets, including Psychological Inquiry, Judgment and Decision Making, the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. He serves as a board member of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (JBDM), Peer Community In: Registered Reports (PCI: RR), and the European Association for Decision Making (EADM).

Beyond academia, Tobias is trained as a professional chef (see Culinary corner for details). He was in one of the first cohorts of the unique double-degree program “LIZE-Koch: Gesellenbrief + Abitur”, which has since become an established program at his former German high school. He worked as a sous-chef at Restaurant Donauperle for a couple of years and as a restaurant critic for Seezunge, a local gourmet guide in the Lake Constance region. Although he no longer cooks professionally, he continues to volunteer in various culinary roles—for example, cooking for youth and community programs.

On this website, you can find an overview of his main research topics and interests, publications, and full academic CV. If you have any questions or would like to connect, feel free to reach out at tr.rebholz@gmail.com.