Hello, my name is Ulrich Kühnen. I am Professor of Psychology at Jacobs University since 2002. I grew up in a small town near the Dutch border and moved to Berlin in summer 1989 to study Psychology. What an experience to literally see the political changes in the then still existing GDR which culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989! The East-West divide was noticeable in almost all aspects of everyday life at that time, and so I became more and more interested in understanding how societal and cultural factors have an impact on the way we think, feel and act - in other words: This is how I became a Social Psychologist. Studying how culture affects our mind is my first and most important research topic ever since. I am also interested in the functioning of stereotypes. In particular, I am interested in the consequences of gender stereotypes for the attribution of leadership skills to men and women. These two research foci, culture and cognition on the one hand and stereotypes on the other, complement each other nicely and I hope my research can contribute to promote Mercator College's first mission statement: Make diversity an asset! I am proud to be elected as an honorary member of Mercator College.

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