About

For some more information about my person please click here.

… my work.

Broadly defined, I am interested in motivated cognition, social influence, and social judgment & decision making. Of course, these themes are interrelated and not mutual exclusive…

Motivated Cognition. Together with Gerald Echterhoff and E. Tory Higgins I am investigating how people satisfy their affiliative as well as epistemic needs through audience-tuned communication. When tuning to an audience people adapt their message’s evaluative tone and content to their audience’s presumed attitude toward the communication topic. For example, when a professor believes her colleague likes a new graduate student, she is likely to recount the student’s behaviors in her class in a favorable light to her colleague. Intriguingly, audience tuning affects not only the messages communicators transmit to their audience, but it can also bias the communicators’ own subsequent memory for the message topic (see Echterhoff, Higgins, Kopietz, & Groll, 2008). In the example, such an audience-tuning effect on memory occurs when the professor later remembers the student’s behaviors more positively, consistent with her audience-tuned message.

As we could demonstrate, audience-tuned communication biases speakers’ later representation of the communication topic only to the extent to which they are motivated to create a shared reality with the audience (Echterhoff et al., 2008; also see Echterhoff, Higgins, & Levine, 2010). For this to occur, the speaker needs to be epistemically motivated (Kopietz, Hellmann, Higgins, & Echterhoff, 2010), and the audience needs to be sufficiently trustworthy (e.g., Echterhoff et al., 2005, 2008; Kopietz, Echterhoff, Niemeier, Hellmann, & Memon, 2009).

Social Influence. Audience-tuning effects can also be construed as a subtle and rather indirect form of social influence on memory. This is particularly interesting as well as important in the applied field of eyewitness memory research. So far, research on communication effects on eyewitness memory has focused on speaker effects on listeners (e.g., Loftus’ famous misinformation effect, Roediger, Meade, and Bergman’s social contagion paradigm, or Gabbert, Memon, and Allan’s memory conformity paradigm). In contrast, in some of our more recent studies (e.g., Hellmann, Echterhoff, Kopietz, Niemeier, & Memon, 2011; Kopietz et al., 2009) speakers (here in the role of eyewitnesses) are affected by their own audience-tuned messages to a fellow witness.

Social Judgment & Decision Making. Finally, I am interested in how retrieval processes contribute to people’s judgments about their memory (e.g., for autobiographical, shared, or eyewitness memories) or other people. I am particularly interested in how subjective processing ease (or difficulty) influences eyewitnesses’ assessment of their memory’s quality, and how this in turn influences their willingness to act. Naturally, only if a person trusts his or her memory, he or she will act accordingly. For example, you will only get up, dress, and go to the doctor, if you are sufficiently certain that you actually have a doctor’s appointment. Of course, missing an appointment with the doctor will most likely be of no consequence, but what if the memory in question belongs to a witnessed criminal act? What effects does ease of processing or retrieval have on eyewitnesses’ memory judgments and later acts? These are all question I am currently investigating (Kopietz & Echterhoff, in preparation b). Furthermore, I am also currently interested in how ease of retrieval contributes to the creation and maintenance of stereotypes about stigmatized out-groups (i.e., Turks in Germany).


… me.


Education

  • Between 2000 and 2005 undergraduate and graduate studies in psychology at the University of Cologne. Degree: Diplom-Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych. – equivalent to a MA or MSc)
  • Between 2005 and 2009 postgraduate / PhD studies at the University of Bielefeld. Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (Dr. phil.- equivalent to a Ph.D.)

Work

  • 2011 – now: Assistant Professor (“Wiss. Ang.”), Social Psychology Unit, WWU Münster
  • 2010 – 2011: Teaching Fellow at the Devision of Psychology & Language Sciences, UCL
  • 2010 – 2009: Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
  • 2009: Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
  • 2008 – 2009: Research Associate, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany – in a project investigating audience-tuning effects on eyewitness memory, funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), primary investigators: Gerald Echterhoff (Bremen, Germany) and Amina Memon (Aberdeen, UK)
  • 2008: Teaching and Research Associate, Social Psychology, Bielefeld University, Germany, on a temporary position (50%) of an associate professorship (“C1, wiss. Assistent”)
  • 2007 – 2008: Research Associate, Social Psychology, Bielefeld University, Germany – in a project investigating audience-tuning effects on eyewitness memory, funded by the DFG and the ESRC, primary investigators: Gerald Echterhoff (Bielefeld, Germany) and Amina Memon (Aberdeen, UK)
  • 2005 – 2007: Research Associate, Social Psychology, Bielefeld University, Germany – in a project investigating audience-tuning effects on memory, funded by the DFG, primary investigator and supervisor: Gerald Echterhoff)
  • 2003 – 2004: Freelancer at Mediascore (an institute for consumer and media psychology and research), Cologne, Germany
  • 2002 – 2005: Student Research Assistant, University of Cologne, Germany

Other Activities

  • Editor-in-chief (together with Malte Friese) of the German edition of the In-Mind Magazine.
  • Ad-hoc reviewer for Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, British Journal of Psychology, British Journal of Social Psychology, Emotion, Experimental Psychology, In-Mind Magazine, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Psychologist, and Social Cognition

Collaborators