Bertram Gawronski


Bertram Gawronski is a Social Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his research in the areas of attitudes, social cognition, decision making, and moral psychology.

Biography

Bertram Gawronski earned his MA in philosophy at the Free University of Berlin in 1998 and his PhD in psychology at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2001. From 2001 to 2002 Gawronski worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Fritz Strack at the University of Würzburg and from 2002 to 2004 with Galen Bodenhausen at Northwestern University. In 2004, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, where he was awarded a Canada Research Chair in 2005. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2008 and to the rank of Professor in 2010. Since January 2014, he is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held the David Wechsler Regents Chair in Psychology from 2015 to 2020.

Research

Gawronski's research investigates the mental processes underlying social judgments and social behavior. A central focus of his research concerns the interplay of automatic and controlled processes in attitudes, social cognition, and decision making.
Gawronski's most influential work is the associative-propositional evaluation model, a dual process theory that specifies the relation between explicit and implicit evaluations. A central assumption of the APE model is that spontaneous "implicit" evaluations and deliberate "explicit" evaluations are the product of two functionally distinct mental processes. Whereas implicit evaluations are assumed to be the outcome of associative processes, explicit evaluations are assumed to be the outcome of propositional processes. Associative processes are conceptualized as the activation of associations on the basis of feature similarity and spatio-temporal contiguity during learning. Propositional processes are defined as the validation of activated information on the basis of basic principles of cognitive consistency. The APE model has been instrumental in explaining diverging patterns of attitude change, including changes in implicit but not explicit evaluations, changes in explicit but not implicit evaluations, corresponding changes in implicit and explicit evaluations, and opposite changes in implicit and explicit evaluations. In 2011, the Council of Canadian Academies identified Gawronski and Bodenhausen's first article on the APE model as one of the 1% most frequently cited psychology papers worldwide published during the period of 2000-2008. Since its publication in 2006, this article has been cited more than 2000 times.
In 2008, Gawronski's research received widespread attention in the popular media with a study that predicted future decisions of undecided voters by means of an implicit-association test. The findings fueled debates about whether people can make decisions outside of conscious awareness, questioning a central idea underlying theories of rational choice. In 2012, follow-up research by Gawronski and his colleagues qualified such a strong interpretation by showing that undecided individuals selectively search for information that is consistent with their implicit preferences, which in turn provides the basis for conscious decisions.
Another influential line of research by Gawronski investigated the generalization versus contextualization of implicit evaluations. The research was inspired by inconsistent findings showing that implicit evaluations can be highly robust and difficult to change, highly malleable and easy to change, and highly context-dependent. To account for these disparate findings, Gawronski and his colleagues developed a learning theory that specifies the contextual conditions under which implicit evaluations reflect initially learned attitudinal information, subsequently learned counterattitudinal information, or a mixture of both. Corresponding to similar patterns found in animal learning, the theory predicts that implicit evaluations tend to reflect the valence of counterattitudinal information only in the context in which this information was learned, and the valence of initial experiences in any other context. The findings received widespread attention for their implications on the stability of first impressions, suggesting that experiences that contradict a first impression are bound to the context in which they were made. Gawronski's work on these questions has been recognized with the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Best Social Cognition Paper Award by the International Social Cognition Network.

Honors and awards