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Research

SoCCCo brings together nine research groups that study a broad array of topics in social cognition. The overall goal is to better understand how people think about, judge, and behave towards others by examining the underlying cognitive processes.

In addition to the DFG Research Unit Relativity in Social Cognition, SoCCCo is home to the Emmy Noether Program Evaluation and Memory (Gast Group).

→ Click on a group for more detailed information on its research program.
→ Click here for an overview of SoCCCo's research topics.
→ Click here for an overview of third-party funded projects.

Research Program

Crusius | Gast | Genschow | Glöckner| LammersUnkelbach

  • The researchers in the Crusius Group investigate a variety of topics in social cognition. One key interest concerns how trust vs. distrust changes the way humans process information and influences social behavior. Furthermore, we explore how social comparisons, their underlying cognitive processes, and their emotional consequences affect psychological phenomena at the intraindividual, the interpersonal, and at the group level. Further important research areas include moral cognition and moral behavior, stereotyping and prejudice, the consequences of ostracism, the psychology of personal beliefs such as mind-body dualism, and empathy and perspective taking. Taken together, our research interests cover a broad array of basic and applied questions about social behavior. [more]

  • In the Gast Group, we study social, affective, and evaluative phenomena by applying empirical, theoretical and methodological knowledge from social cognition and cognitive psychology, especially from memory and learning psychology. The main focus lies on evaluative conditioning and other forms of evaluative learning. In the Emmy-Noether group, we study these phenomena from a memory-and-retrieval perspective. Other research topics include the underlying processes of implicit measures and the relations of gender and academic achievement. [more]

  • The Genschow Group mainly focuses on interaction patterns among humans with a strong focus on perception-action coupling, such as imitation, mimicry, and anticipated action. Other topics of investigation include consumer behavior with a focus on implicit attitude measures and approach-avoidance motivation. [more]

  • The researchers in the Glöckner Group investigate a broad range of topics concerning judgment and decision making in social and economic contexts. One key interest concerns how judgments and decisions are formed using both intuitive and deliberate processes, which biases occur in information search and information integration and how these processes can be modeled using (e.g.) neural network models. A second topic concerns the investigation of cooperation, pro-social behavior, social preferences, trust, as well as stereotypes and discrimination. We thereby are particularly interested in cultural differences and cross-cultural interactions.  A third focus is on methodological developments such as approaches for formal theory specification, multi-measure strategy classification methods, artificial intelligence, and replication. 

  • Research in the Lammers Group focuses on social differences. One research interest concerns the psychological effects of power. Here we aim to find out how having (versus lacking) power affects people’s thoughts, decisions, and behavior. We also try to better understand the limits and moderators of such effects. A second research interest concerns moral cognition and behavior. In particular, we are interested in how people’s need to compare favorably with others affects their moral (and immoral) functioning. A third research interest lies in political psychology. Political psychology has been criticized for painting a stereotypic image of those on the right of the political spectrum (i.e. conservatives). We try to correct this and gain a more nuanced and deeper understanding of the psychology behind political conservatism. Fourth and finally, we do research on gender and sexism. In the past decades, women have made great advances toward gaining a more equal position, but much work still needs to be done. Our research is aimed at detecting obstacles and finding solutions to help in this process. [more]

  • The research within the Unkelbach Group covers a wide range of topics; among the prime interests are positive-negative asymmetries in perceiving, processing, and retrieving information, evaluative and attribute conditioning, serial judgments and decisions, motivational underpinnings of athletic performance, and stereotypes and prejudice against Muslims. However, the group members have interests that are not covered here, and the group's page provides a more elaborated overview. [more]