Christian Unkelbach

Christian Unkelbach is Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cologne, where he leads the Unkelbach Group. His research spans multiple domains of social and cognitive psychology with significant contributions to understanding evaluative processes.

His primary research interests include Social Cognition, Evaluative Judgments, Information Ecologies, Stereotypes and Prejudice, Evaluative Learning, Fluency Effects, and Sport Psychology. Unkelbach's work examines how humans process evaluative information in social contexts, with particular focus on the truth-by-repetition effect, evaluative conditioning, and cognitive ecological frameworks that explain why certain information patterns dominate social cognition. His research demonstrates how repetition increases belief in information, how attributes become associated through mere pairings, and why positive information is processed more efficiently than negative information.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals a consistent trajectory examining the relativity of social cognition, truth effects across contexts, and metacognitive awareness of cognitive biases. His work increasingly integrates cross-linguistic perspectives and examines real-world applications in media consumption and social judgment.

• Honorary Doctorate from UCLouvain (2025)
• ISCON Best Paper Award 2020
• Speaker of DFG Research Unit FOR2150 'Relativity in Social Cognition' (2017-2021)
• Emmy Noether Research Grant (DFG, 2009-2013)
• Feodor Lynen Research Scholarship (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation)
• Fulbright Scholarship

Unkelbach has advised numerous doctoral researchers including Andreas Miculka, Anne Irena Weitzel, Felix Speckmann, Lea Sperlich, and Tabea Zorn. His research group has secured multiple C-SEB grants for projects examining social cognition phenomena. The Unkelbach Group maintains active collaborations with international researchers across Europe and North America, with recent work funded through the DFG Research Unit on Relativity in Social Cognition.

The Unkelbach Group laboratory at Richard-Strauss-Str. 2 in Cologne comprises postdoctoral researchers, doctoral candidates, and student assistants working on experimental paradigms examining evaluative learning, truth effects, and social judgment processes. Current projects investigate cross-linguistic truth effects, metacognitive monitoring of repetition effects, and ecological validity in social cognition frameworks.