Alex Koch

Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

alex.koch@chicagobooth.edu

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 social cognition. Accordingly, my social cognition research seeks to understand how we form impression of, and evaluate, others to disengage or initiate purposeful behaviors toward them. I focus on two topics: biased evaluation and open-ended impression formation.

My research aims to explain impressions, evaluations, and behaviors not only in terms of people’s 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’s impressions etc. than people’s psychology, and thus the ecology is an insightful explanation of their impressions etc. The participants in my studies encountered and evaluated large and representative samples of people and things, and the participants’ memory and descriptions of their attributes were open‑ended. This broadens the scope of my findings. Moreover, I started adversarial collaborations with several authors whose work seemed inconsistent with mine. We always learned something new and developed a sharper understanding of each research program.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

[1] Gallardo, R., Smith, A., Zak, U., Lopez, D., Kirgios, E., & Koch, A. (2024). Being in the minority boosts in-group love: Explanations and boundary conditions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [view]

[2] Koch, A., Smith, A., Fiske, S. T., Abele, A., Ellemers, N., & Yzerbyt, V. (2024). Validating a brief measure of four facets of social evaluation. Behavior Research Methods. [view]

Invited contributions

[1] Koch, A., Woitzel, J., & Roberts, R. (2024). Social projection and cognitive differentiation co-explain self-enhancement and in-group favoritism. Psychological Inquiry, 35, 50-52. [view]

[10] Forgas, J. P., & Koch, A. (2013). Mood effects on cognition. In M. Robinson, E. Watkins, & E. Harmon-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of Emotion and Cognition (pp. 231-252). New York, NY: Guilford Press. [view]

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