Alex Koch
Biographic Data
| ID | 4231044 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Koch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Koch |
| SIGNATURE | KOCH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6267-8066 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 132 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
“If Immoral Then Unable”: Asymmetric Generalizations in Social Judgment
Morality and ability are two key dimensions of social judgment. Across four experiments (total N = 1,418, three preregistered), we examined how information about one dimension shapes impressions in the other. In Experiment 1, participants generated positive and negative behaviors related to either morality or ability and then evaluated each behavior on the other dimension. Negative moral behaviors led to stronger inferences of low ability than ne…
Unconstrained Descriptions of Facebook Profile Pictures Support High-Dimensional Models of Impression Formation
Dominant models of impression formation focus on two fundamental dimensions: a horizontal dimension of warmth/communion/trustworthiness and a vertical dimension of competence/agency/dominance. However, these models have typically been studied using theory-driven methods and stimuli of restricted complexity. We used a data-driven approach and naturalistic stimuli to explore the latent dimensions underlying >300,000 unconstrained linguistic descrip…
Ability, Assertiveness, Morality, and Friendliness? A Retrospective Validation of the Facet Model of Social Evaluation
Five adversarial models (the DPM, BRM, DCM, SCM, and ABC) used a plethora of items to measure social-evaluative dimensions and facets between 2002 and 2023. This challenges their negotiated integration of agency and competence into vertical social evaluation with the facets of ability and assertiveness, and their integration of communality and warmth into a horizontal dimension with the facets of morality and friendliness. In seven studies ( N = …
Ideological Favoritism and In-Group Favoritism: A Double Dissociation of U.S. Progressives and Conservatives
People appreciate others who seem similar to themselves. Two well-documented similarity-attraction effects are in-group favoritism (i.e., preference for in-groups over out-groups) and ideological favoritism (i.e., preference for the groups whose ideologies align [vs. conflict] with one’s own beliefs). There is debate about whether ideological favoritism is stronger among conservatives, progressives, or neither, and research has yet to explore ide…
Perceived Power Polarizes Moral Evaluations
We show an interactive effect of perceiver-target similarity in ideological beliefs and target power on impressions of target morality. Consistent with prior research, perceivers rated targets with dissimilar ideologies as less moral than targets with similar ideologies, but this difference in ratings was magnified for powerful targets relative to less powerful targets. We argue that these results emerged because perceivers expected similar-ideol…
Attitude Formation Based on Political Views: An Expectancy-Value Model of Interpersonal Likability in Politics
How affective polarization in Western democracies results from the interplay of ideological differences and group identification remains unclear. To better understand these processes and address the call for falsifiable theories, we propose a formalized Expectancy-Value Model of Interpersonal Likability in Politics (EVIL-P). It argues that people (dis)like targets with (dis)similar political views (i.e., value), especially if these views are rare…
Being in the minority boosts in-group love: Explanations and boundary conditions
People appreciate members of their in-group, and they cooperate with them-tendencies we refer to as in-group love. Being a member of a minority (vs. majority) is a common experience that varies both between groups in a context and within a group between contexts, but how does it affect in-group love? Across six studies, we examined when and why being in the minority boosts in-group love . In Study 1, being in the minority boosted people's appreci…
Rethinking rose-tinted glasses: A cognitive-ecological explanation of prospective self-comparisons
Differentiation in social perception: Why later-encountered individuals are described more negatively
According to the cognitive-ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons. Because distinct …
Ideological beliefs as cues to exploitation-exploration behavior
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental assumption that in order to understand intra-psychic cognitive processes one first has to understand t…
Reminders undermine impressions of genuine gratitude
While reminders can help by encouraging prosocial behaviors, we propose that they can also hurt. Across 10 studies, most of which focus on reminders to express gratitude, we find that reminders interfere with impressions of genuine prosociality. Whether people are reminded subtly (Studies 1a and 6-8) or blatantly (Studies 2-5) to express gratitude, the reminder is perceived to put social pressure on the potential thanker, making reminded thankers…
Ideological prejudice is stronger in ideological extremists (vs. moderates)
The agency–beliefs–communion (ABC) model and worldview conflict research show that people rate groups as more moral and likable if they rate their ideology as more similar to the ideology of the self. This paper refers to this effect as ideological prejudice. There is a debate whether ideology moderates the effect size of ideological prejudice. Through three observational studies ( N S1 = 700, N S2 = 974, N S3 = 633), this paper contributes to th…
Relational versus structural goals prioritize different social information
People gather information about others along a few fundamental dimensions; their current goals determine which dimensions they most need to know. As proponents of competing social-evaluation models, we sought to study the dimensions that perceivers spontaneously prioritize when gathering information about unknown social groups. Because priorities depend on functions, having relational goals (e.g., deciding whether and how to interact with a group…
Q-SpAM: How to Efficiently Measure Similarity in Online Research
Measuring the similarity of stimuli is of great interest to a variety of social scientists. Spatial arrangement by dragging and dropping 'more similar' targets closer together on the computer screen is a precise and efficient method to measure stimulus similarity. We present Qualtrics-spatial arrangement method (Q-SpAM), a feature-rich and user-friendly online version of spatial arrangement. Combined with crowdsourcing platforms, Q-SpAM provides …
Identifying the dimensions of secrets to reduce their harms
How does the content of secrets relate to their harms? We identified a data-driven model (across five empirical steps), which suggested that secrets are generally seen to differ in how immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented they are (Study 1). The more a secret was consensually perceived to be immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented, the more that secret was reported to evoke feelings of shame, social connectedness, and insig…
Navigating the social world: Toward an integrated framework for evaluating self, individuals, and groups
Social evaluation occurs at personal, interpersonal, group, and intergroup levels, with competing theories and evidence. Five models engage in adversarial collaboration, to identify common conceptual ground, ongoing controversies, and continuing agendas: Dual Perspective Model (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007); Behavioral Regulation Model (Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007); Dimensional Compensation Model (Yzerbyt et al., 2005); Stereotype Content Model (…
Dyadic judgments based on conflicting samples: The failure to ignore invalid input
The present research demonstrates a so far unrecognized impediment of group performance, metacognitive myopia (Fiedler, 2012). Judges and decision‐makers follow the given samples of information uncritically and neglect the metacognitive assessment of the samples' validity. Applying this notion to dyadic judgments, we instructed dyads to jointly estimate conditional probabilities p (Win|A) and p (Win|B) of Lotteries A and B. One person per dyad ex…
The ABC of society: Perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases intergroup cooperation
Groups' warmth is a personal matter: Understanding consensus on stereotype dimensions reconciles adversarial models of social evaluation
Truth by Repetition: Explanations and Implications
People believe repeated information more than novel information; they show a repetition-induced truth effect. In a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and strategic information management, understanding this effect is highly important. We first review explanations of the effect based on frequency, recognition, familiarity, and coherent references. On the basis of the latter explanation, we discuss the relations of these explanations. We th…
The evaluative information ecology: On the frequency and diversity of “good” and “bad”
We propose the Evaluative Information Ecology (EvIE) model as a model of the social environment. It makes two assumptions: Positive “good” information is more frequent compared to negative “bad” information and positive information is more similar and less diverse compared to negative information. We review support for these two properties based on psycho-lexical studies (e.g., negative trait words are used less frequently but they are more diver…
Studying the Cognitive Map of the U.S. States: Ideology and Prosperity Stereotypes Predict Interstate Prejudice
What are the spontaneous stereotypes that U.S. citizens hold about the U.S. states? We complemented insights from theory-driven approaches to this question with insights from a novel data-driven approach. Based on pile sorting and spatial arrangement similarity ratings for the states, we computed two cognitive maps of the states. Based on ratings for the states on ∼20 candidate dimensions, we interpreted the dimensions that spanned the two maps (…
(Pre)occupations: A data-driven model of jobs and its consequences for categorization and evaluation
The Political Domain Appears Simpler to the Politically Extreme Than to Political Moderates
How does political preference affect categorization in the political domain? Eight studies demonstrate that people on both ends of the political spectrum—strong Republicans and strong Democrats—form simpler and more clustered categories of political stimuli than do moderates and neutrals. This pattern was obtained regardless of whether stimuli were politicians (Study 1), social groups (Study 2), or newspapers (Study 3). Furthermore, both strong R…
The ABC of stereotypes about groups: Agency/socioeconomic success, conservative–progressive beliefs, and communion
Previous research argued that stereotypes differ primarily on the 2 dimensions of warmth/communion and competence/agency. We identify an empirical gap in support for this notion. The theoretical model constrains stereotypes a priori to these 2 dimensions; without this constraint, participants might spontaneously employ other relevant dimensions. We fill this gap by complementing the existing theory-driven approaches with a data-driven approach th…
Groups' warmth is a personal matter: Understanding consensus on stereotype dimensions reconciles adversarial models of social evaluation
My friends are all alike — the relation between liking and perceived similarity in person perception
Can negative mood improve language understanding? Affective influences on the ability to detect ambiguous communication
Feeling good and feeling truth: The interactive effects of mood and processing fluency on truth judgments
The ABC of society: Perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases intergroup cooperation
(Pre)occupations: A data-driven model of jobs and its consequences for categorization and evaluation
Identifying the dimensions of secrets to reduce their harms
How does the content of secrets relate to their harms? We identified a data-driven model (across five empirical steps), which suggested that secrets are generally seen to differ in how immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented they are (Study 1). The more a secret was consensually perceived to be immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented, the more that secret was reported to evoke feelings of shame, social connectedness, and insig…
Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms
Can temporary mood influence people's communication strategies? According to Grice's cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice's maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social…
Relational versus structural goals prioritize different social information
People gather information about others along a few fundamental dimensions; their current goals determine which dimensions they most need to know. As proponents of competing social-evaluation models, we sought to study the dimensions that perceivers spontaneously prioritize when gathering information about unknown social groups. Because priorities depend on functions, having relational goals (e.g., deciding whether and how to interact with a group…
Differentiation in social perception: Why later-encountered individuals are described more negatively
According to the cognitive-ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons. Because distinct …
Ideological prejudice is stronger in ideological extremists (vs. moderates)
The agency–beliefs–communion (ABC) model and worldview conflict research show that people rate groups as more moral and likable if they rate their ideology as more similar to the ideology of the self. This paper refers to this effect as ideological prejudice. There is a debate whether ideology moderates the effect size of ideological prejudice. Through three observational studies ( N S1 = 700, N S2 = 974, N S3 = 633), this paper contributes to th…
Fluency and positivity as possible causes of the truth effect
Feeling good and feeling truth: The interactive effects of mood and processing fluency on truth judgments
Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms
Can temporary mood influence people's communication strategies? According to Grice's cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice's maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social…
Can negative mood improve language understanding? Affective influences on the ability to detect ambiguous communication
My friends are all alike — the relation between liking and perceived similarity in person perception
The ABC of stereotypes about groups: Agency/socioeconomic success, conservative–progressive beliefs, and communion
Previous research argued that stereotypes differ primarily on the 2 dimensions of warmth/communion and competence/agency. We identify an empirical gap in support for this notion. The theoretical model constrains stereotypes a priori to these 2 dimensions; without this constraint, participants might spontaneously employ other relevant dimensions. We fill this gap by complementing the existing theory-driven approaches with a data-driven approach th…
The Political Domain Appears Simpler to the Politically Extreme Than to Political Moderates
How does political preference affect categorization in the political domain? Eight studies demonstrate that people on both ends of the political spectrum—strong Republicans and strong Democrats—form simpler and more clustered categories of political stimuli than do moderates and neutrals. This pattern was obtained regardless of whether stimuli were politicians (Study 1), social groups (Study 2), or newspapers (Study 3). Furthermore, both strong R…
Studying the Cognitive Map of the U.S. States: Ideology and Prosperity Stereotypes Predict Interstate Prejudice
What are the spontaneous stereotypes that U.S. citizens hold about the U.S. states? We complemented insights from theory-driven approaches to this question with insights from a novel data-driven approach. Based on pile sorting and spatial arrangement similarity ratings for the states, we computed two cognitive maps of the states. Based on ratings for the states on ∼20 candidate dimensions, we interpreted the dimensions that spanned the two maps (…
(Pre)occupations: A data-driven model of jobs and its consequences for categorization and evaluation
Truth by Repetition: Explanations and Implications
People believe repeated information more than novel information; they show a repetition-induced truth effect. In a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and strategic information management, understanding this effect is highly important. We first review explanations of the effect based on frequency, recognition, familiarity, and coherent references. On the basis of the latter explanation, we discuss the relations of these explanations. We th…
The evaluative information ecology: On the frequency and diversity of “good” and “bad”
We propose the Evaluative Information Ecology (EvIE) model as a model of the social environment. It makes two assumptions: Positive “good” information is more frequent compared to negative “bad” information and positive information is more similar and less diverse compared to negative information. We review support for these two properties based on psycho-lexical studies (e.g., negative trait words are used less frequently but they are more diver…
Navigating the social world: Toward an integrated framework for evaluating self, individuals, and groups
Social evaluation occurs at personal, interpersonal, group, and intergroup levels, with competing theories and evidence. Five models engage in adversarial collaboration, to identify common conceptual ground, ongoing controversies, and continuing agendas: Dual Perspective Model (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007); Behavioral Regulation Model (Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007); Dimensional Compensation Model (Yzerbyt et al., 2005); Stereotype Content Model (…
Dyadic judgments based on conflicting samples: The failure to ignore invalid input
The present research demonstrates a so far unrecognized impediment of group performance, metacognitive myopia (Fiedler, 2012). Judges and decision‐makers follow the given samples of information uncritically and neglect the metacognitive assessment of the samples' validity. Applying this notion to dyadic judgments, we instructed dyads to jointly estimate conditional probabilities p (Win|A) and p (Win|B) of Lotteries A and B. One person per dyad ex…
The ABC of society: Perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases intergroup cooperation
Groups' warmth is a personal matter: Understanding consensus on stereotype dimensions reconciles adversarial models of social evaluation
Identifying the dimensions of secrets to reduce their harms
How does the content of secrets relate to their harms? We identified a data-driven model (across five empirical steps), which suggested that secrets are generally seen to differ in how immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented they are (Study 1). The more a secret was consensually perceived to be immoral, relational, and profession/goal-oriented, the more that secret was reported to evoke feelings of shame, social connectedness, and insig…
Ideological prejudice is stronger in ideological extremists (vs. moderates)
The agency–beliefs–communion (ABC) model and worldview conflict research show that people rate groups as more moral and likable if they rate their ideology as more similar to the ideology of the self. This paper refers to this effect as ideological prejudice. There is a debate whether ideology moderates the effect size of ideological prejudice. Through three observational studies ( N S1 = 700, N S2 = 974, N S3 = 633), this paper contributes to th…
Relational versus structural goals prioritize different social information
People gather information about others along a few fundamental dimensions; their current goals determine which dimensions they most need to know. As proponents of competing social-evaluation models, we sought to study the dimensions that perceivers spontaneously prioritize when gathering information about unknown social groups. Because priorities depend on functions, having relational goals (e.g., deciding whether and how to interact with a group…
Q-SpAM: How to Efficiently Measure Similarity in Online Research
Measuring the similarity of stimuli is of great interest to a variety of social scientists. Spatial arrangement by dragging and dropping 'more similar' targets closer together on the computer screen is a precise and efficient method to measure stimulus similarity. We present Qualtrics-spatial arrangement method (Q-SpAM), a feature-rich and user-friendly online version of spatial arrangement. Combined with crowdsourcing platforms, Q-SpAM provides …
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental assumption that in order to understand intra-psychic cognitive processes one first has to understand t…
Reminders undermine impressions of genuine gratitude
While reminders can help by encouraging prosocial behaviors, we propose that they can also hurt. Across 10 studies, most of which focus on reminders to express gratitude, we find that reminders interfere with impressions of genuine prosociality. Whether people are reminded subtly (Studies 1a and 6-8) or blatantly (Studies 2-5) to express gratitude, the reminder is perceived to put social pressure on the potential thanker, making reminded thankers…
Differentiation in social perception: Why later-encountered individuals are described more negatively
According to the cognitive-ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons. Because distinct …
Ideological beliefs as cues to exploitation-exploration behavior
Ideological Favoritism and In-Group Favoritism: A Double Dissociation of U.S. Progressives and Conservatives
People appreciate others who seem similar to themselves. Two well-documented similarity-attraction effects are in-group favoritism (i.e., preference for in-groups over out-groups) and ideological favoritism (i.e., preference for the groups whose ideologies align [vs. conflict] with one’s own beliefs). There is debate about whether ideological favoritism is stronger among conservatives, progressives, or neither, and research has yet to explore ide…
Perceived Power Polarizes Moral Evaluations
We show an interactive effect of perceiver-target similarity in ideological beliefs and target power on impressions of target morality. Consistent with prior research, perceivers rated targets with dissimilar ideologies as less moral than targets with similar ideologies, but this difference in ratings was magnified for powerful targets relative to less powerful targets. We argue that these results emerged because perceivers expected similar-ideol…
Psychology (27 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (22 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (13 works) · Cognition (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works)