A central focus of his research concerns the interplay of automatic and controlled processes in attitudes, social cognition, and decision making.
In 2011, the Council of Canadian Academies identified Gawronski and Bodenhausen's first article on the APE model as one of the 1% most frequently cited psychology papers worldwide published during the period of 2000–2008.
[3] In 2008, Gawronski's research received widespread attention in the popular media with a study that predicted future decisions of undecided voters by means of an implicit-association test (conducted in collaboration with Silvia Galdi and Luciano Arcuri at the University of Padova, Italy).
In 2012, follow-up research by Gawronski and his colleagues qualified such a strong interpretation by showing that undecided individuals selectively search for information that is consistent with their implicit preferences, which in turn provides the basis for conscious decisions.
[5] Another influential line of research by Gawronski investigated the generalization versus contextualization of implicit evaluations (conducted in collaboration with Robert Rydell at Indiana University, US, Bram Vervliet at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and Jan De Houwer Ghent University, Belgium).
Together with Paul Conway, Gawronski developed a process dissociation model to disentangle the independent contributions of utilitarian and deontological inclinations to moral dilemma judgments.