Norbert Schwarz

Norbert Schwarz is the Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of Psychology in the Social Psychology program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He also has appointments as Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, Research Professor in the Program in Survey Methodology and Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Mannheim, Germany (1980) and a “Habilitation” in psychology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany (1986). He served as Scientific Director of ZUMA, an interdisciplinary social science research center in Mannheim (1987–1992) before moving to the University of Michigan in 1993. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2000-01 and 2009-10.

Norbert Schwarz is among the most frequently cited living researchers in Social Psychology and Consumer Psychology. A core theme of his work is that people do not have stable, coherent and readily accessible attitudes that can be reliably measured through self-report. Instead, opinions are constructed on the spot and recent, contextual factors exert a disproportionate influence on judgments. These influences include feelings (such as moods, emotions, and metacognitive experiences), inferences about the meaning implicit in questions, and whether feelings and thoughts are used to form a representation of the target of judgment or the standard against which it is compared.