Forschungsschwerpunkte Sozialpsychologie
Below you find short descriptions of selected current research projects.
Person Perception and Impression Formation from behavior
Little information is often enough for us to form an impression about a person: We tend to ascribe traits to people even if we have only seen a photo of their face or learned about a single behavior of this person. Our research group is investigating the basic social-cognitive processing that underlies such spontaneous inferences of traits, what information is processed, how it is integrated with other information, and what consequences these processes have for our behavior in social interactions. This research is currently supported by financial project funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG), and has received additional project funding from the Landesforschungsförderung of the City of Hamburg (LFF; 2020-2024).
Automatic evaluation processes as the foundation of prejudices, stereotypes and discrimination
When we perceive people, we process basic category affiliations, and attribute age, gender, or ethnicity, for example, to people quite automatically, without necessarily being aware of it. As a result, prejudices and stereotypes about certain social groups may influence us even when we do not want to or are convinced to think and act tolerantly. We explore what consequences such automatic processing has for the evaluation of people, the willingness to interact, and political polarization processes.
Social identity in members of stigmatized groups
Members of stigmatized groups are exposed to negative evaluations, prejudice, and discrimination in society. We explore the impact of these experiences as well as social identity processes in members of different stigmatized groups. How do social identity, group membership, and stigma consciousness develop in childhood and adolescence? What role do different socialization factors play in this? What influence do experiences of discrimination have? Do stigmatized groups differ with respect to these processes and why? The focus here is on the perspective and experiences of minorities.
Social identity in "Mixed" Individuals
We often construe social groups as categories as binary: One either belongs or does not belong. For some people, however, questions of belonging and identification are not that easily answered. For example, an individual belongs to a family with different ethnic and/or racial group memberships, may have the potential choice to identify with several ethnic or racial groups simultaneously. In our research, we investigate how social identity is formed under such circumstances and how it flexibly responds to different contextual demands.
Automatic ingroup attitudes among members of stigmatized groups
How do members of stigmatized minorities cope with society's negative evaluations or stereotypes? In this research project, we investigate under which conditions negative stigma is accepted and internalized or corrected and actively combated. We focus here primarily on the distinction between unconscious, automatic processes and conscious, controlled processes. This research is currently supported by start-up funding under the “Exzellenzstrategie von Bund und Ländern”.
Emotion perception and social categorization
Recognizing emotion expressions from faces plays a central role in navigating our social interactions. It allows us to infer the internal states of others and assess their positive or negative intentions. Albeit humans are experts in quickly and acucrately detecing emotional expressions in others' faces, social categorizations and associated stereotypes and prejudice can fundamentally influence emotion perception and impression formation. We have founded a small research network, including collaborators from the USA (Kurt Hugenbrrg) and the Netherlands (Gijs Bijlstra) in which we together investigate the underlying mechanisms of such categorical processes on emotion perception.
Face perception and social categorization
We often have difficulties when we are asked to recognize the face of a person with a ethnicity other than our own. We quickly get the thought: "They all look the same". This so-called other-race effect has been researched in social psychology for a very long time. In our studies, we investigate to what extent attentional and working memory processes contribute to the poor recognition performance, and which individual experiences and attitudes and situational influences strengthen or reduce this effect. This research was supported, among others, by a project grant from the Ideas & Risk Fund of the University of Hamburg.
Tools for the improvement of psychological assessments in family law courts
Within the framework of this approach of application-oriented science, tools are developed at the department which can be used by psychological experts in family law. For example, alternative samples for psychological test procedures commonly used in family law have been and are being generated and made available to experts free of charge. Other tools that have already been developed or are in development include expert-validated interview guidelines, calculation aids for critical differences and confidence intervals, and survey instruments for parents. The idea is to provide application-oriented solutions in order to improve the quality of expert opinions in family law in the long term.