Peter Ejbye-Ernst

peterI am a sociologist working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement and at the department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. I have a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in sociology from the University of Copenhagen.

In my PhD project, I am interested in getting closer to an understanding of how interpersonal conflicts develop and how we can use CCTV-footage to better understand this. I analyze the developments of conflict behavior in the video material on a second-to-second basis and investigate how behavioral exchanges can explain why some situations calm down while other go awry. I am particularly interested in the role that third-parties play in interpersonal conflicts and the potential that this group holds to de-escalate conflicts. I defended my PhD thesis successfully at University of Amsterdam in 2022.

Besides the PhD-project, I am also involved in various research projects investigating behavioral aspects of the corona pandemic. Using CCTV-footage we investigate how the large-scale societal changes engendered by the pandemic influence the behavior of each of us in our everyday life. This has led to studies investigating e.g. how social distancing behavior changes over time and how wearing a face mask influences the way we behave.