Prof. Dr. Friederike Funk
Associate Professor
Social Psychology with a focus on Legal Psychology
Research Topics
- The subjective experience of justice from victim and observer perspectives: punishment motives, forgiveness, Restorative Justice
- Person perception in legal contexts: remorseful transgressors, criminal stereotypes, expectations toward victims
- Trust in Co-Creation with AI in the legal system
- Social-cognitive mechanism in intergroup contexts: reducing and preventing prejudice and radicalization
Academic Education and Positions
- since 04/2023
- Associate Professor for Social Psychology with a focus on Legal Psychology, LMU Munich
- 2019-2023
- Assistant Professor of Practice in Psychology, NYU Shanghai
- 2015-2019
- PostDoctoral Researcher, University of Cologne
- 2012-2015
- PhD in Psychology, Princeton University
- 2012-2015
- M.A. in Psychology, Princeton University
- 2004-2010
- Diploma in Psychology (Master’s equivalent), University Koblenz-Landau
Current third-party funded projects
- How “human” should justice be? Psychological determinants of trust in co-creation with generative AI in the context of the legal system (PI: Friederike Funk), funded by the bidt (Bavarian Institute for Digital Transformation), 2025-2029
- Social cognitive mechanisms of prejudice reduction (PI: Friederike Funk), part of “Disinformation and identity construction in democratic society”, funded by the BMFTR (Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space)
Memberships in Scientific Societies
German Psychological Society (DGPs); Member of the Social Psychology Division and the Legal Psychology Division (DGPs)
European Association of Psychology and Law (EAPL)
International Society for Justice Research (ISJR)
International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA) --- Editor, ISRA Bulletin
Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)
Legal Psychological Practice
Friederike Funk serves as a legal expert for statement validity analysis.
Publications
- Funk, F.* & McGeer, V.* (2025). Moral communication. In B. F. Malle & P. Robbins (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology, 382-406. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108894357.020 [*shared first-authorship]
- Meacham, A.M., Kleider-Offut, H.M., & Funk, F. (2023). Looking more criminal: It’s not so black and white. Memory & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01451-1; https://osf.io/b2dca/
- Hechler, S., Funk, F., & Kessler, T. (2023). Not revenge, but change is sweet: Experimental evidence of how offender change and punishment play independent roles in victims’ sense of justice. British Journal of Social Psychology, 62, 1013-1035. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12613; https://osf.io/bg8qz/
- Funk, F.* & Mischkowski, D.* (2022). Examining consequentialist punishment motives in one-shot social dilemmas. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 230(2), 127-137. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000459 [*shared first-authorship]; https://osf.io/mpcyw/
- Erle, T.M. & Funk, F. (2022). Visuospatial and affective perspective-taking: Similarities and differences. Social Psychology, 53(5), 315-326. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000504; https://osf.io/pqa87/
- Martinez, J.E., Funk, F., & Todorov, A. (2020). Quantifying idiosyncratic and shared contributions to judgment. Behavior Research Methods, 52(4), 1428-1444. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01323-0; https://osf.io/q28g6/
- Funk, F., Walker, M., & Todorov, A. (2017). Modeling perceptions of criminality and remorse from faces using a data-driven computational approach. Cognition and Emotion, 31(7), 1431-1443. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2016.1227305
- McGeer, V. & Funk, F. (2017). Are 'optimistic' theories of criminal justice psychologically feasible? The probative case of civic republicanism. Criminal Law & Philosophy, 11(3), 523-544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9381-2