We are delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Iris K. Schneider to the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences. Prof. Schneider has accepted the appointment to the Chair of Social and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Sociology and Social Psychology. With her, we gain an internationally recognized social psychologist whose work sits at the heart of some of the most contested topics of our time.
Iris Schneider studies the complexity of attitudes around controversial and contentious issues, and how people navigate them, at work, in private life, and in the wider social and political sphere. Her research on ambivalence, the experience of holding positive and negative views at the same time, shows that mixed feelings are not indifference or weakness. People who hold them often think more broadly, show less bias, and reach more balanced decisions, and expressing ambivalence can build rather than erode trust, even on polarizing topics. She is a scientist with her finger firmly on the pulse of the times.
Originally from the Netherlands, Prof. Schneider brings a career shaped early by practice. Before her studies she worked at the internet provider @Home (now part of Ziggo), while studying Business Informatics at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences before switching to the VU University to study Psychology full-time. After completing her Master's in Social Psychology (Regulation of Social Behavior) she spent a year as an Assessment and Development Consultant at Young Executive Recruitment and then began her PhD at the University of Amsterdam.
She went on to hold research positions as an NWO Rubicon Fellow at the University of Southern California and at VU Amsterdam. From 2016 to 2022 she was Junior Professor of Social and Economic Cognition at the University of Cologne, followed by a professorship in Social Psychology at TU Dresden, where she was awarded the Karl-und-Charlotte-Bühler Prize for excellent teaching.
With Prof. Dr. Iris K. Schneider, we gain a renowned scientist whose work appears in leading journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. She is an elected Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, serves on the editorial board of Current Opinion in Psychology, and her work has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). A first-generation academic, she is a committed mentor to early-career researchers. Welcome to WiSo!