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Norbert Schwarz Scientist

Norbert Schwarz is Provost Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. 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). Schwarz taught at the University of Heidelberg from 1981 to 1992 and served as Scientific Director of ZUMA,now GESIS, an interdisciplinary social science research center(1987–1992). From 1993 to 2013, he worked at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he held appointments as the Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of Psychology in the Social Psychology program, 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 was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2000/01; 2009/10) and held visiting positions at universities in Europe (e.g., University of Wurzburg, Germany) and Asia (e.g., Hong Kong University of Science and Technology).Norbert Schwarz is among the most frequently cited 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.