My research is mainly concerned with social cognition, attribution, stereotyping, and intergroup relations.
After my early work on the Black Sheep effect and the Ingroup
Overexclusion effect, I mainly developed an interest in stereotyping and
more specifically in the formation and preservation of stereotypes as
well as their suppression. The basic idea is that people rely on
stereotypes not only for cognitive reasons (they face limited resources)
but also for motivational reasons (their stereotypes serve their own as
well as their group's image) and social reasons (they believe their
stereotypes are shared by their group members). For many years, I
studied group perception by examining aspects of homogeneity,
entitativity, and essentialism.
Together with several colleagues, I also conduct research on social and
group-based emotions. Specifically, we investigate whether, how, and why
people experience emotions not because of events that occur to them
personally, but because of events that affect members of groups to which
they belong. More recently, I turned to the issue of fundamental
dimensions of social perception in the context of what I call the
compensation pattern of stereotypes: people who are perceived to be
competent also tend to be perceived as not so warm and conversely.
Another interest of mine is statistics and methods. The research
conducted so far focuses on the use of ANCOVA in personality and social
research and issues of moderated mediation and mediated moderation.
I have been serving as an associate editor of the British Journal of
Social Psychology (1994-1998), of the Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin (1998-2000), and of the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (2005-2008). I am currently
the Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science
(2009-2012). I have been a member of the Executive Committee of the
European Association of Social Psychology, first as its treasurer
(1999-2002) and then as its president (2002-2005). In light of my
scientific contribution, I was awarded the 2007 Career Trajectory Award
from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the 2008 Kurt
Lewin Award from the European Association of Social Psychology. I am
also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (2008) and of
the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2011).
