Philipp is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Managing Director of the Digital Media and Behavior Lab. He previously worked as a research associate at the Department of Communication of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) and the Department of Media Psychology at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart (Germany). From 2018 to 2019, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication at the Cornell University (Ithaca, USA).
He has studied communication science, economic sciences, and philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) and the Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). In 2018, he earned his PhD in the social sciences at the University of Hohenheim.
Philipp’s research focuses on different aspects of digital communication and the impact of social media on our daily lives. It is characterized by interdisciplinary perspectives and a variety of methodological approaches, including survey, experimental, and computational methods. More specifically, he studies social influence and persuasion processes on social media, privacy and self-disclosure in networked publics, different types of media literacies, and social media use effects on individual well-being. He is further interested in meta-scientific questions related to open science, transparency, and replication. In his research, he follows open science practices and, whenever possible, he aims to make materials, data, and analyses publicly available on the Open Science Framework.
Philipp’s research has been presented at various international conferences and has been published in high-ranked international journals (e.g., Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, PLOS One, JAMA Pediatrics, Computers in Human Behavior, or Human Communication Research) and several edited volumes (→ publications). In 2018, he published the book Situational Privacy and Self-Disclosure in which he advanced a comprehensive theory on person-situation interactions in online privacy processes (→ book). Together with Sabine Trepte, he edited The Routledge Handbook of Privacy and Social Media, which was published in June 2023 (→ edited volume). He was recently awarded a VENI innovation grant (→ blogpost) by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). In this project, he will study how behavioral contagion propagates problematic behaviors on social media.
He often develops original software and tools for his research (→ github). Among other things, he has developed the R package specr that provides a versatile framework for conducting multiverse/specification curve analyses (→ website). He also contributed to The Truman Platform, a complete, open-source social media simulation tool.
Philipp is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Media Psychology and Mobile Media & Communication as well as a consulting editor for the European Journal of Social Psychology. Philipp is further co-founder of the Comparative Privacy Research Network (→ comparativeprivacy.org) and member of the Computational Communication Science Amsterdam Group (→ ccs-amsterdam.github.io).
As an academic teacher, Philipp has taught several courses on online communication, persuasion and marketing, media psychology, statistics, and computational methods. He also frequently conducts statistic workshops for researchers at various universities (→ teaching).
For more information, have a look around this website or download his curriculum vitae (→ CV).
