Norbert Schwarz

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Norbert Schwarz (born March 28, 1953 in Annweiler am Trifels ) is Provost Professor at the University of Southern California , where he teaches in the Department of Psychology and at the Marshall School of Business. Previously, he was Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Professor of Marketing at the Business School, Research Professor in the Survey Methods Program, and Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research at the same university. After receiving his doctorate ( University of Mannheim , 1980) and habilitation ( University of Heidelberg , 1986), he was scientific director of the Center for Surveys, Methods and Analyzes ( ZUMA ) before he emigrated to the USA in 1993.

Norbert Schwarz is one of the most cited contemporary social psychologists . In 2004 he and Fritz Strack received the Wilhelm Wundt Medal of the German Society for Psychology and in 2015 he was awarded the Oswald Külpe Prize . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . In 2016 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel . He has received numerous science awards, including the Donald T. Campbell Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology , the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology , the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology , and the Wilhelm Wundt-William James Award the American Psychological Association and the European Federation of Psychologists' Associations . In 2019, Schwarz was elected to the Academia Europaea .

A central assumption of his work is that people do not have stable, coherent and easily retrievable attitudes that can be reliably measured. Instead, opinions are formed spontaneously and strongly influenced by contextual factors. These influences include feelings such as a person's mood or metacognitive feelings such as processing fluency or spontaneously drawn conclusions about the meaning of questions. It also plays a role whether people believe that feelings and thoughts are relevant to the judgment.

Feeling as information

Norbert Schwarz developed the " feelings-as-information" theory, one of the most influential explanations for the cognitive consequences of affect. This theory states that in the formation of a judgment about an object, feelings flow into the information for judging the object. Although this type of judgment is entirely reliable, individuals may be wrong about the source of this information. A classic experiment on this hypothesis was carried out by Schwarz and Clore: Individuals reported higher life satisfaction when they were in a positive mood than when they were in a negative mood. This influence of mood disappears when the interviewers mention the weather before they ask about life satisfaction, because the people correctly assign the current mood to the weather. This shows that the current mood is used as information in evaluations.

Another feeling that played an important role in the “feel-as-information” perspective is the metacognitive feeling of ease or difficulty in retrieving information. Indeed, Schwarz and his colleagues were able to show that people tend to make their judgments based on the phenomenal experience of ease of retrieval. However, these feelings can be aroused by various factors that are not related to the judgment, for example the characteristics of the task (listing a few versus many specific events), processing fluency (high versus low figure-ground contrast, legible versus less legible fonts ) or by manipulating the motor feedback (e.g. contraction of the eyebrows). The experience of processing fluid created in this way influences judgments about truth, frequency, risk and beauty: Objects that are more easily processed are viewed as more true, more frequent, riskier and more beautiful.

In an elegant experiment, a group of subjects was asked to list six episodes in which they behaved confidently, which is a relatively easy task; the other group had to list twelve such behaviors, which is relatively difficult. The subjects were then asked to indicate how confident they were. In fact, the test subjects used the feeling of ease of retrieval as information and rated themselves as more self-confident if they had to retrieve 6 instead of 12 episodes of their own self-confidence.

In another experiment, perceptual fluency was manipulated by figure-ground contrast, so that statements of the form “Osorno is in Chile” were either easy to read or more difficult to read. If the statements were easy to read, the test subjects judged the statements to be more true than statements that were difficult to read.

Conversational maxims and answers in surveys

Norbert Schwarz is also known for his research into the cognitive processes involved in answering questions in surveys. A survey interview is seen as a conversation between the interviewer and the respondent. Like all conversations, interview situations are subject to the conversation maxims postulated by the language philosopher Paul Grice , which arise from the principle of cooperation . Then people try to truthfully and clearly communicate the information that is necessary and relevant. According to Schwarz, respondents not only follow conversational maxims in their answers, but also assume that the questions the interviewer asks follow the same maxims.

An example of the effect of these maxims in surveys is a study in which people had to answer the question of how successful they were in their life. One group responded on a scale with numerical endpoints 0 and 10; here 34% responded with a rating between 0 and 5, saying that their life was not very successful. The other group responded on a scale with the endpoints −5 and 5; here only 13% answered with a number between −5 and 0, which corresponds to the range between 0 and 5 in the first group. The numerical endpoints are interpreted differently by the test subjects: If the scale goes from 0 to 10, then the respondents interpret the lower half of the scale as an absence of success, which does not necessarily mean that a person suffered failure. The scale from -5 to 5, on the other hand, is interpreted as the presence of success - and not just the absence of failure.

Similarly, following conversational maxims can cause sequence effects if information in question A is part of the information in question B, but not vice versa. In one experiment, a group of married people were asked first how satisfied they were with their life, then how satisfied they were with their marriage. The two responses were highly correlated because marital satisfaction is an important component of life satisfaction. Another group was asked about their satisfaction with their marriage, then their satisfaction with life. Here the answers correlated less because the people surveyed interpreted the question about life satisfaction in such a way that they had already stated marital satisfaction and this was probably no longer of interest when assessing life satisfaction.

The inclusion / exclusion model

Norbert Schwarz and Herbert Bless developed the inclusion / exclusion model, which explains assimilation and contrast effects in the formation of judgments. In social judgment, information is compared with standards and then the judgment is made. Assimilation effects occur here if the judgment object is viewed as similar to the standard and the judgment is adapted in the direction of the standard (inclusion). Contrast effects can be observed when the judgment object is delimited from the standard and the judgment is adjusted in the direction away from the standard (exclusion).

Identical information leads to different judgments, depending on whether it is used to assess the judgment object (inclusion) or whether it is compared with the judgment object (exclusion). For example, if a person thinks about a certain politician who was or is involved in a scandal (for example Richard Nixon ), then they can come to the conclusion that all politicians are corrupt because the corrupt example - here Nixon - falls into the category Politicians are locked in, so that they come to the attitude that "they are all like Nixon". But if you ask about individual politicians (e.g. Angela Merkel ), then they are presented as more honest, because they are compared with Nixon as the standard and get off well in this comparison and the assessors come to the conclusion that he or she is not like Nixon be.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leopoldina: Newly elected members 2009 (PDF file)
  2. ^ A. Tesser, JJ Bau: Social psychology: Who we are and what we do. In: Personality and Social Psychology Review. 6, 2002, pp. 72-85.
  3. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. phil. Norbert Schwarz (with picture) at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on July 22, 2016.
  4. ^ N. Schwarz, GL Clore: Feelings and phenomenal experiences. In: ET Higgins, AW Kruglanski (Ed.): Social Psychology: Handbook of basic principles. 2nd Edition. Guilford, New York 2007, pp. 385-407.
  5. ^ N. Schwarz, GL Clore: Mood, misattribution and judgment of well-being. Informative and directive functions of affective states. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ,. 45, 1983, pp. 513-523.
  6. ^ N. Schwarz, H. Bless, F. Strack, G. Klumpp, H. Rittenauer-Schatka, A. Simons: Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 61, 1991, pp. 195-202.
  7. ^ R. Reber , N. Schwarz: Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth. In: Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal. 8, 1999, pp. 338-342.
  8. ↑ N. Schwarz, B. Knauper, HJ Hippler, E. Noelle-Neumann, F. Clark: Rating scales: Numeric values may change the meaning of scale labels. In: Public Opinion Quarterly. 55, 1991, pp. 570-582.
  9. ↑ N. Schwarz, F. Strack, HP Mai: Assimilation and contrast effects in part-whole question sequences: A conversational logic analysis. In: Public Opinion Quarterly. 55, 1991, pp. 3-23.
  10. ^ N. Schwarz, H. Bless: Scandals and the public's trust in politicians: Assimilation and contrast effects. In: Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 18, 1992, pp. 574-579.

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personal data
SURNAME Black, Norbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American social psychologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH March 28, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Annweiler am Trifels