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)
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
Legal Psychological Practice
Friederike Funk serves as a legal expert for statement validity analysis.