Norbert Schwarz
Encyclopedia
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 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.
In other work from the feelings-as-information perspective, Schwarz suggests that metacognitive experiences, such as the feeling of ease or difficulty in recalling or processing information, can exert significant influence on judgments. In other words, people tend to make judgments based on this interpretation of their subjective feelings of ease or difficulty in information processing. Such feelings can come from a variety of different sources that are irrelevant to a judgment. For example, the feeling of effort can be elicited by contextual features such as the demands of the task (trying to come up with a few versus many exemplars), processing fluency (high or low figure-ground contrast, easy- versus difficult-to-read fonts) and motor movements (brow contraction). Effortful feelings produced by these manipulations can influence judgments about truth, frequency, risk, and beauty: Easy-to-process stimuli are viewed as more accurate, more likely, less risky, and more beautiful.
For instance, his work has shown that people tend to conclude that they are more assertive when they are asked to recall 6 instances of assertive behavior (an easy task), compared to 12 instances of their own assertiveness (a difficult task), even though the people asked to list 12 instances end up generating more examples of assertive behavior. This demonstrates that the meaning of thought content is informed by the experience of thinking about it.
As another example, inferences about familiarity can be drawn from feelings of ease. As a result, when a sentence such as ‘Orsono is a city in Chile,’ is presented in easy-to-read print fonts, people tend to judge it as true more often than when it is presented in hard-to-read print fonts. This effect is presumably driven by people’s inference based on their naïve theory that easily processed statements are likely to have been encountered before, and therefore, are likely to be true.
advanced by Paul Grice
, the late philosopher of language. Put simply, the cooperative principle states that people try to communicate clearly and truthfully, in as much detail as required (but not more so), giving only relevant information. In Schwarz's view, the respondent not only follows the Gricean maxims (Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Manner) when responding to surveys but also assumes that the questions the interviewer asks are guided by the same principles.
Schwarz's research implicates the operation of these maxims during various stages of the survey question and answering process, and highlights how features of the research instrument can significantly impact the answers obtained. For example, when asked about how successful their lives have been, 34% of respondents reported that their lives have been highly successful when the response scale was labeled -5 to 5, whereas only 13% reported high success when the scale was labeled 0 to 10. Presumably this is because the survey respondent assumes that negative integers refer to the presence of negative features, while smaller positive integers refer to the absence of positive features.
Similarly, when a question about marital satisfaction precedes a question about general life satisfaction, responses for the two questions are highly correlated because the first question renders information about one's marriage highly accessible. However, this correlation vanishes when the two questions are framed as subordinate parts of a larger question, presumably because the respondent infers that the interviewer does not want redundant information and thus marital satisfaction should be specifically subtracted from general life satisfaction.
in social judgments. Contrast effects occur when exposure to valenced information influences judgments in a way that is incongruent with the valenced information. Assimilation effects occur when exposure to valenced information influences judgments in a way that is congruent with the valenced information. The key insight of the inclusion/exclusion model is that the evaluation of a target of judgment requires bringing to mind both the target itself, and a standard against which it is to be evaluated. Whether valenced information produces contrast or assimilation depends on whether it is included within the target (assimilation) or in the standard against which it is compared (contrast).
Therefore, by manipulating a given piece of information as either included within the target or compared against, the same information can have different consequences for judgments. For example, thinking of a politician involved in a scandal (such as Elliot Spitzer) may make people believe that politicians in general are more corrupt because the corrupt exemplar is information that is included within the representation of "politicians". In short, people would be left thinking "they are all like Spitzer". Paradoxically, at the same time every individual politician that is rated may seem more honest, because for these judgments, the exemplar is used as the standard of comparison. In this case, people are left thinking "he (or she) is not as bad as Spitzer".
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
program at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
at Ann Arbor. He also has appointments as Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business
Ross School of Business
The Stephen M. Ross School of Business is the business school of the University of Michigan. Numerous publications have ranked the Ross School of Business' Bachelor of Business Administration , Master of Business Administration and Executive Education programs among the top in the country and the...
, Research Professor in the Program in Survey Methodology and Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research
Institute for Social Research
The Institute for Social Research is a research organization for sociology and continental philosophy, best known as the institutional home of the Frankfurt School and critical theory....
. 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 2009-10.
Norbert Schwarz is among the most frequently cited living researchers in Social Psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
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
Metacognition
Metacognition is defined as "cognition about cognition", or "knowing about knowing." It can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving...
), 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.
Feelings as Information
Norbert Schwarz proposed the ‘feelings-as-information’ hypothesis, one of the most influential explanations for the cognitive consequences of affect. According to this perspective, when people make judgments about a target, they rely upon their feelings as diagnostic information about the target of judgment. Although this generally produces accurate responses, people sometimes make mistakes about the source of this information. This hypothesis is well demonstrated by mood effects where people tend to evaluate various targets more positively when they are in a good mood than in a bad mood. For instance, people report higher life satisfaction when they are in a good mood on a sunny day rather than in a bad mood on a rainy day. However, if the interviewer mentions the weather before they ask the life satisfaction question, this mood effect disappears because people accurately attribute their current mood to the weather rather than their life satisfaction.In other work from the feelings-as-information perspective, Schwarz suggests that metacognitive experiences, such as the feeling of ease or difficulty in recalling or processing information, can exert significant influence on judgments. In other words, people tend to make judgments based on this interpretation of their subjective feelings of ease or difficulty in information processing. Such feelings can come from a variety of different sources that are irrelevant to a judgment. For example, the feeling of effort can be elicited by contextual features such as the demands of the task (trying to come up with a few versus many exemplars), processing fluency (high or low figure-ground contrast, easy- versus difficult-to-read fonts) and motor movements (brow contraction). Effortful feelings produced by these manipulations can influence judgments about truth, frequency, risk, and beauty: Easy-to-process stimuli are viewed as more accurate, more likely, less risky, and more beautiful.
For instance, his work has shown that people tend to conclude that they are more assertive when they are asked to recall 6 instances of assertive behavior (an easy task), compared to 12 instances of their own assertiveness (a difficult task), even though the people asked to list 12 instances end up generating more examples of assertive behavior. This demonstrates that the meaning of thought content is informed by the experience of thinking about it.
As another example, inferences about familiarity can be drawn from feelings of ease. As a result, when a sentence such as ‘Orsono is a city in Chile,’ is presented in easy-to-read print fonts, people tend to judge it as true more often than when it is presented in hard-to-read print fonts. This effect is presumably driven by people’s inference based on their naïve theory that easily processed statements are likely to have been encountered before, and therefore, are likely to be true.
Gricean Maxims and Survey Response
Norbert Schwarz is also well known for his research on cognitive processes underlying survey response. This work generally treats the survey interview context as a conversation between the researcher and the respondent. According to this logic, surveys are governed by the cooperative principleCooperative principle
In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people interact with one another. As phrased by Paul Grice, who introduced it, it states, "Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or...
advanced by Paul Grice
Paul Grice
Herbert Paul Grice , usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H...
, the late philosopher of language. Put simply, the cooperative principle states that people try to communicate clearly and truthfully, in as much detail as required (but not more so), giving only relevant information. In Schwarz's view, the respondent not only follows the Gricean maxims (Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Manner) when responding to surveys but also assumes that the questions the interviewer asks are guided by the same principles.
Schwarz's research implicates the operation of these maxims during various stages of the survey question and answering process, and highlights how features of the research instrument can significantly impact the answers obtained. For example, when asked about how successful their lives have been, 34% of respondents reported that their lives have been highly successful when the response scale was labeled -5 to 5, whereas only 13% reported high success when the scale was labeled 0 to 10. Presumably this is because the survey respondent assumes that negative integers refer to the presence of negative features, while smaller positive integers refer to the absence of positive features.
Similarly, when a question about marital satisfaction precedes a question about general life satisfaction, responses for the two questions are highly correlated because the first question renders information about one's marriage highly accessible. However, this correlation vanishes when the two questions are framed as subordinate parts of a larger question, presumably because the respondent infers that the interviewer does not want redundant information and thus marital satisfaction should be specifically subtracted from general life satisfaction.
Categorization and Judgment
Norbert Schwarz's work on categorization and mental construal led to the development of his inclusion/exclusion model that accounts for the emergence of contrast and assimilation effectsAssimilation effect
The assimilation effect is a frequently observed bias in evaluative judgments towards the position of a context stimulus. When an assimilation effect occurs, judgments and contextual information are correlated positively, i.e. a positive context stimulus results in a positive judgment, whereas a...
in social judgments. Contrast effects occur when exposure to valenced information influences judgments in a way that is incongruent with the valenced information. Assimilation effects occur when exposure to valenced information influences judgments in a way that is congruent with the valenced information. The key insight of the inclusion/exclusion model is that the evaluation of a target of judgment requires bringing to mind both the target itself, and a standard against which it is to be evaluated. Whether valenced information produces contrast or assimilation depends on whether it is included within the target (assimilation) or in the standard against which it is compared (contrast).
Therefore, by manipulating a given piece of information as either included within the target or compared against, the same information can have different consequences for judgments. For example, thinking of a politician involved in a scandal (such as Elliot Spitzer) may make people believe that politicians in general are more corrupt because the corrupt exemplar is information that is included within the representation of "politicians". In short, people would be left thinking "they are all like Spitzer". Paradoxically, at the same time every individual politician that is rated may seem more honest, because for these judgments, the exemplar is used as the standard of comparison. In this case, people are left thinking "he (or she) is not as bad as Spitzer".