From 2005 to 2006, Vitouch was head of the Department of Psychology, and from 2006 to 2012, Chairman of the University's Senate. He served as Member of the Board and President of the. In this capacity, he contributed significantly to the implementation of university admission laws in consequence of the 2005 judgement of the European Court of Justice decreeing open access to Austrian universities also for German students. Oliver Vitouch took office as Rector of the University of Klagenfurt in October 2012. He has been re-elected for a second four-year term in May 2015, and for a third term in May 2019. From January 2015 to May 2016, he was in charge as President of the Alps-Adriatic Rectors’ Conference, a society founded 1979 in Graz with currently 49 member universities from Austria, Southern Germany, Hungary, Upper Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Albania. His successor in this role was Dragan Marušič. Since January 2016, he served as Vice-President and from June 2016 to December 2017 as President of Universities Austria, the association of Austria's 22 federal research universities. He was chiefly involved into the enactment of Austria’s new system of university funding. Not running for another term as President, he is active as Vice-President again since January 2018, and has served as Acting President in the second half of 2019. On June 9, 2016, a group of identitarians invaded a lecture on inclusion at the University of Klagenfurt. Aiming to keep hold of the squad leader until the police arrives, Vitouch was punched in the stomach. The offender was convicted of aggravated assault on July 12, 2019 by the criminal court in Graz. As Vice-President of Universities Austria, Vitouch was significantly involved into the emergence of the initiative Universities for Enlightenment, sustained by the Rectors' Conferences of Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Serbia, Switzerland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. This was triggered by the expulsion of the Central European University by the Hungarian government, the governmental reorganization of Hungarian Universities, and the government/university conflicts in Poland and the Czech Republic. The ten Rectors' Conferences signed the "Vienna Statement" in December 2018.
Media activities
From November 2017 to January 2020, Vitouch wrote for the column Außensicht of Kleine Zeitung, Austria's largest regional daily. Earlier, he had sporadically contributed to the op-ed page of Der Standard since 1996. His main topics were higher education, science, and Enlightenment.
. When your ear sets the stage: Musical context effects in film perception. Psychology of Music, 29, 70–83.
Neumeister, A., Konstantinidis, A., Stastny, J., Schwarz, M. J., Vitouch, O., Willeit, M., Praschak-Rieder, N., Zach, J., de Zwaan, M., Bondy, B., Ackenheil, M., & Kasper, S.. Association between serotonin transporter gene promoter polymorphism and behavioral responses to tryptophan depletion in healthy women with and without family history of depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 59, 613–620.
Gigerenzer, G., Krauss, S., & Vitouch, O.. The null ritual: What you always wanted to know about significance testing but were afraid to ask. In D. Kaplan, The SAGE handbook of quantitative methodology for the social sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hanoch, Y., & Vitouch, O.. When less is more: Information, emotional arousal and the ecological reframing of the Yerkes-Dodson law. Theory & Psychology, 14, 427–452.
. The musical mind: Neural tuning and the aesthetic experience. In P. B. Baltes, P. Reuter-Lorenz & F. Rösler, Lifespan development and the brain: The perspective of biocultural co-constructivism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Vitouch, O., & Ladinig, O. . Music and evolution. Musicae Scientiae, 13.
Marewski, J., Pohl, R., & Vitouch, O.. Recognition-based judgments and decisions: What we have learned. Judgment and Decision Making, 6, 359–380.
Martignon, L., Vitouch, O., Takezawa, M., & Forster, M. R.. Naive and yet enlightened: From natural frequencies to fast and frugal decision trees. In G. Gigerenzer, R. Hertwig & T. Pachur, Heuristics: The foundations of adaptive behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
