Kornadt, born in Stargard in Pomerania in 1927, worked after completing his doctorate in Marburg as an assistant at the Psychological Institute of the University of Würzburg and in 1961 became a lecturer at the Comenius University in Saarbrücken. Since then he has worked closely with the Psychological Institute of Saarland University and, among other things, carried out research projects in East Africa . After rejecting a call for social psychology at the University of Bochum, he took over the chair for educational psychology and educational science at the University of Saarland in autumn 1968.
Kornadt has been awarded the Saarland Order of Merit, the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, and the German-Japanese Research Award. He was not only dedicated to teaching, whereby guest professorships and cross-cultural research projects also took him to Indonesia and Japan, but was also active in high-ranking committees in the field of education and science policy and science planning. He was a member of the Science Council, President of the German Society for Psychology and the German-Japanese Society for Social Sciences he founded, Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research and the Wilhelm-Wundt Society. His scientific work includes 150 publications, in particular on aggression research, motivational psychology and cross-cultural psychology. After his retirement, he was Senate representative for the development of the educational science faculty of the re-established University of Erfurt, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2009.
