天美传媒

Biography

We constantly encounter other individuals and groups, face-to-face or remotely. Who is irrelevant, pleasant, or aversive, and for what reasons? Finding truthful and useful answers to these questions is important and requires that we observe, infer, remember, and reflect on the attributes, similarities and differences between individuals, groups, and ourselves. This is known as 蝉辞肠颈补濒听肠辞驳苍颈迟颈辞苍. Accordingly, Alex Koch鈥檚 social cognition research seeks to understand how we form impression of, and evaluate, others to disengage or initiate purposeful behaviors toward them. Alex focuses听on two topics: biased evaluation and open-ended impression formation.

First, Alex examines whether others鈥� vices influence our evaluations and behaviors toward them more听profoundly than their virtues. One prominent account is that the aversive implications of people鈥檚 negative attributes can be more intense than the pleasant implications of their positive听attributes. Alex鈥檚 scientific work complements this 鈥榖ad is stronger than good鈥� account with a 鈥榞ood is more alike than bad鈥� explanation that predicts negativity听bias when we differentiate, but positivity bias when we look for similarities. 听听

Second, Alex examines the content of the attributes on which we compare societal groups. A prominent model posits that people care to memorize and describe the degree of competence and warmth of groups and their members. Alex鈥檚 alternative model argues that people also care to memorize and describe their ideological beliefs. Moreover, people鈥檚 impressions of the groups鈥� competence, warmth, and beliefs hang听together and predict their behavior toward the members of the groups.

Alex鈥檚 research aims to explain impressions, evaluations, and behaviors not only in terms of people鈥檚 psychology (i.e., motivation, affect, and cognition), but also through the ecology (i.e., the distribution of information). The insightfulness of an explanation increases with the distance between what explains and what is explained. The ecology is more distant to people鈥檚 impressions etc. than people鈥檚 psychology, and thus the ecology is an insightful explanation of their impressions etc. The participants in Alex鈥檚 studies encountered and evaluated large and representative samples of people and things, and the participants鈥� memory and descriptions of their attributes were open-ended. This broadens the scope of Alex鈥檚 findings. Moreover, Alex started adversarial collaborations with several authors whose work seemed inconsistent with his own work. They always learned something new and developed a sharper understanding of each research program.

Alex鈥檚 research has been published in several impactful journals in (cognitive and social) psychology and beyond, including Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alex completed undergraduate studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Cologne in Germany. Prior to joining Booth, Alex held a postdoctoral position at the University of Cologne.

Academic Areas

• Behavioral Science