Alex Koch

Associate 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 repulsive, 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.

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).

Further, the participants in my studies encountered large and representative samples of people and things, and they described them in an open‑ended way.

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.

Evaluations

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. Selected publications include …   

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]

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]

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]

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]

Impressions

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. Selected publications include …   

*Yzerbyt, V., *Koch, A., Brambilla, M., Ellemers, N., Fiske, S. T., & Nicolas, G. (2025). Dimensions of stereotypes about groups. Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Connor, P., Antonoplis, S., Nicolas, G., & Koch, A. (2025). Unconstrained descriptions of Facebook profile pictures support high-dimensional models of impression formation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [view]

Roberts, R., & Koch, A. Power polarizes moral evaluations. (2024). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. [view]

*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]

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