Anton Gollwitzer

After completing bachelor’s degrees in psychology and computer science at New York University, I joined the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Emotion Laboratory of Prof. John A. Bargh at Yale University. My research interests have included automaticity, self-regulation strategies, and sub-clinical paranoia. I have conducted research on the self-regulation strategies, mental contrasting and implementation intentions, specifically concerning their ‘automatic’ components. Regarding paranoia, I have explored how paranoia influences the response to non-threatening compared to threatening stimuli, as well as the relationship between paranoia and perceived loneliness.

Currently I am working on generalized person perception: How the individual perceives people in general. While research has examined how people perceive other individuals, how people perceive human nature has been less focused on. Specifically, we have observed that some lay people can more accurately judge how people in general feel, think, and behave, and that this ability is related to specific cognitive, social, and personality constructs.