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.
First, I examine whether others’ vices influence our evaluations and behaviors toward them more profoundly than their virtues. One prominent account is that the aversive implications of people’s negative attributes can be more intense than the pleasant implications of their positive attributes. My scientific work complements this ‘bad is stronger than good’ account with a ‘good is more alike than bad’ explanation that predicts negativity bias when we differentiate, but positivity bias when we look for similarities.
Second, I examine 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. My alternative model argues that people also care to memorize and describe their ideological beliefs. Moreover, people’s impressions of the groups’ competence, warmth, and beliefs hang together and predict their behavior toward the members of the groups.
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] 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]
[2] Connor, P., Antonoplis, S., Nicolas, G., & Koch, A. (2024). Unconstrained descriptions of Facebook profile pictures support high-dimensional models of impression formation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [view]
[3] Woitzel, J., & Koch, A. (2024). Political rule (vs. opposition) predicts whether ideological prejudice is stronger in U.S. conservatives or progressives. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [view]
[4] Roberts, R., & Koch, A. Power polarizes moral evaluations. (2024). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [view]
[5] Koch, A., Bromley, A., Woitzel, J. & Alves, H. (2024). Differentiation in social perception: Why later-encountered individuals are described more negatively. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126, 978-997. [view]
[6] Wang, J., Chaudhry, S., & Koch, A. (2024). Reminders undermine impressions of genuine gratitude. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126, 1171-1192. [view]
[7] Woitzel, J., & Koch, A. (2023). Ideological prejudice is stronger in ideological extremists (vs. moderates). Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 26, 1685-1705. [view]
[8] Koch, A., Speckmann, F., & Unkelbach, C. (2022). Q-SpAM: Using spatial arrangement to measure similarity in efficient online research powered by Qualtrics. Sociological Methods and Research, 51, 1442-1464. [view]
[9] Nicolas, G., Fiske, S. T., Koch, A., Imhoff, R., & Unkelbach, C., Terache, J., Carrier, A., & Yzerbyt, V. (2022). Relational versus structural goals prioritize different social information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122, 659-682. [view]
[10] Slepian, M., & Koch, A. (2021). Identifying the dimensions of secrets to reduce their harms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120, 1431-1456. [view]
[11] *Abele, A., *Ellemers, N., *Fiske, S. T., *Koch, A., & *Yzerbyt, V. (2021). Navigating the social world: Shared horizontal and vertical evaluative dimensions. Psychological Review, 128, 290-314. [view]
[12] Koch, A., Dorrough, A., Glöckner, A., & Imhoff, R. (2020). The ABC of society: Similarity in agency and beliefs predicts cooperation across groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 90, 103996. [view]
[13] Koch, A., Imhoff, R., Unkelbach, C., Nicolas, G., Fiske, S. T., Terache, J., Carrier, A., & Yzerbyt, V. (2020). Groups’ warmth is a personal matter: Understanding consensus on stereotype dimensions reconciles adversarial models of social evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 89, 103995. [view]
[14] *Ellemers, N., *Fiske, S. T., *Abele, A., *Koch, A., & *Yzerbyt, V. (2020). Adversarial alignment enables competing models to engage in cooperative theory-building, toward cumulative science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117, 7561-7567. [view]
[15] Fiedler, K., Krüger, T., Koch, A., & Kutzner, F. (2020). Dyadic judgments based on conflicting samples: The failure to ignore invalid input. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 33, 492-504. [view]
[16] Unkelbach, C., Koch, A., & Alves, H. (2019). The evaluative information ecology: On the frequency and diversity of “good” and “bad”. European Review of Social Psychology, 30, 216-270. [view]
[17] Unkelbach, C, Koch, A., Silva, R., & Garcia-Marquez, T. (2019). Truth by repetition – explanations and implications. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28, 247‑253. [view]
[18] Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2019). The differential similarity of positive and negative information – an affect-induced processing outcome? Cognition and Emotion, 33, 1224-1238. [view]
[19] Koch, A., Kervyn, N., Kervyn, A. & Imhoff, R. (2018). Studying the cognitive map of the U.S. states: Ideology and prosperity stereotypes predict interstate prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 530‑538. [view]
[20] Imhoff, R., Koch, A., & Flade, F. (2018). (Pre)occupations: A data-driven map of jobs and its consequences for categorization and evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 77, 76-88. [view]
[21] Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2018). A cognitive-ecological explanation of intergroup biases. Psychological Science, 29, 1126-1133. [view]
[22] Lammers, J., Koch, A., Conway, P., & Brandt, M. J. (2017). The political domain appears simpler to the politically extreme than to political moderates. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8, 612-622. [view]
[23] Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017). The “common good” phenomenon: Why similarities are positive and differences are negative. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146, 512-528. [view]
[24] Imhoff, R., & Koch, A. (2017). How orthogonal are the Big Two of social perception? On the curvilinear relationship between agency and communion. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 122-137. [view]
[25] *Alves, H., *Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017). Why good is more alike than bad: Processing implications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 72-82. [view]
[26] Koch, A., Alves, H., Krüger, T., & Unkelbach, C. (2016). A general valence asymmetry in similarity: Good is more alike than bad. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 1171-1192. [view]
[27] *Koch, A., & *Imhoff, R., Dotsch, R., Alves, H., & Unkelbach, C. (2016). The ABC of stereotypes about groups: Agency / socio-economic success, conservative‑progressive beliefs, and communion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110, 675-709. [view]
[28] Alves, H., Koch, A., Krüger, T., & Unkelbach, C. (2016) My friends are all alike – On the relation between liking, knowledge and perceived similarity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 62, 103-117. [view]
[29] Alves. H, Unkelbach, C., Burghardt, J., Koch, A. Krüger, T. & Becker, V. (2015). A density explanation for valence asymmetries in recognition memory. Memory and Cognition, 43, 896‑909. [view]
[30] Krüger, T., Fiedler, K., Koch, A., & Alves, H. (2014). Response category width as a psychophysical manifestation of construal level and distance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40, 501‑512. [view]
[31] Matovic, D., Koch, A., & Forgas, J. P. (2014). Can negative mood improve language understanding? Affective influences on the ability to detect ambiguous communication. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 44‑49. [view]
[32] Koch, A., Forgas, J. P., & Matovic, D. (2013). Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice’s communication norms. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 326‑334. [view]
[33] Koch, A., & Forgas, J. P. (2012). Feeling good and feeling truth: The interactive effects of mood and processing fluency on truth judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 481‑485. [view]
[34] Unkelbach, C., Bayer, M., Alves, H., Koch, A., & Stahl, C. (2011). Fluency andpositivity as possible causes of the truth effect. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 594‑602. [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]
[2] Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2023). Evaluative consequences of sampling distinct information. In K. Fiedler, P. Juslin, & J. Denrell (Eds.), Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making (pp. 222-244). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [view]
[3] Unkelbach, C., Koch, A., & Alves, H. (2021). Explaining negativity dominance without processing bias. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25, 429-430. [view]
[4] *Koch, A., *Yzerbyt, V., *Abele, A., *Ellemers, N., & *Fiske, S. T. (2021). Social evaluation: Comparing models across interpersonal, intragroup, intergroup, several‑group, and many-group contexts. In B. Gawronski (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 63, pp. 1‑68). Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. [view]
[5] Unkelbach, C., Alves, H., & Koch, A. (2020). Valence asymmetries: Explaining the differential processing of positive and negative information. In B. Gawronski (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 62, pp. 115-187). Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. [view]
[6] Unkelbach, C., & Koch, A. (2019). Gullible but functional?: Information repetition and the formation of beliefs. In J. Forgas & R. Baumeister (Eds.), Homo Credulus: The Social Psychology of Gullibility (pp. 42-60). New York, NY: Guilford Press. [view]
[7] Koch, A., & Imhoff, R. (2018). Rethinking the nature and relation of fundamental dimensions of meaning. In A. Abele & B. Wojciszke (Eds.), Agency and Communion in Social Psychology (pp. 167-179). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. [view]
[8] Fiedler, K., Hofferbert, J., Woellert, F., Krüger, T., & Koch, A. (2015). The tragedy of democratic decision making. In J. Forgas, W. Crano, & K. Fiedler (Eds.), Social Psychological Approaches to Political Psychology (pp. 193‑208). New York, NY: Guilford Press. [view]
[9] Koch, A., Forgas, J. P., & Goldenberg, L. (2013). In the mood to break the rules: Happiness promotes language abstraction and transgression of conversation norms. In J. P. Forgas, O. Vincze, & J. László (Eds.), Social Cognition and Communication (pp. 83-100). New York, NY: Psychology Press. [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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