Gerald Echterhoff

Background

About Gerald Echterhoff

I am fortunate to be the Chair of the Social Psychology Research Group at Uni Münster, with a current appointment as Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research, New York. My research passions span basic social cognition, complemented by social neuroscience, shared reality, motivation in social and political contexts, affective responses, interpersonal and intergroup processes, and issues critical to societal cohesion (forced migration, refugee integration, collective representations, radicalization). The range of these endeavors is rooted in my fascination for the pursuit and advancement of knowledge about how humans think, feel and respond to the world, especially in the company of others.According to my professional philosophy, I honor and promote dialog, crosstalk and collaboration, with a keen appreciation of the diversity of personality, ambitions, strengths and orientations. Analytical precision, methodological rigor, openness & transparency of scientific practices, fairness and sustainability of procedures, enriched with (ideally contagious) enthusiasm are beacons of my work. Through my teaching and mentoring, I aspire to enable students to use and profit from the tools of psychological thinking and science to better understand and contribute to the welfare of society, and to succeed in my own discipline and beyond amidst the various challenges and transformations of our times. I firmly believe that collaboration open to diverse partners (colleagues, peers, junior researchers, students, and non-academics with concerns or involvement in research issues) is a cornerstone of the success of the scientific enterprise at large and my own projects specifically. This conviction implies commitment to transfer from and to the public, media representatives, stakeholders, practitioners, lay persons and institutions. In my career, I have continuously strived to develop my research, writing, teaching, mentoring, and transfer activities, with the ultimate hope of making a non-negligible contribution to a better world.Current research lines: subjective experience and behavior of people in social contexts, which we investigate with a range of methods (e.g. neuroscience, experiments, surveys, experience sampling);how doese the social world and interpersonal communication shape people's experiences (memory, judgment), resulting in different types of shared reality; different forms of discrimination from the perspective of victims and the factors that facilitate or hinder the integration of refugees into host societies.