Social hierarchies; intergroup relations; status signaling; social identity
Psychology of infectious disease; sickness behavior; behavioral immune system
Equity-focused teaching; debunking psychology myths; meta-cognitive assessment
Welcome!
I’m Wilson, a postdoc within the Center for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC) at Aarhus University (Denmark) and guest researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo (Norway). I received my PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 2024.
My primary research program traces the psychology of social hierarchy across three levels at which social life is organized: the places we inhabit, the faces we perceive, and the groups we belong to. For instance, one set of projects tests how the spatial distribution of resources (“patchiness”) shapes perceptions of the places we live, while another focuses on how our mental representations of groups, from poor people to politicians, are (mis)aligned with explicit attitudes towards these groups.
In a parallel research program, I focus on how people navigate one of the most persistent threats across human history: infectious illness. These projects center on disease concealment, a widespread behavioral strategy where people hide their own infectious illness from others, and emphasize the prevalence, predictors, and public health implications of this behavior across the globe.
Across both programs, I favor methods that reveal different levels of psychological processing (including geospatial mapping, visual reverse correlation, and conjoint experiments) and an interdisciplinary approach bridging theoretical perspectives from social psychology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, and political science to explain why these patterns emerge. For more details on these two programs, please see published and on-going work in the Research tab.
I have also been fortunate to teach and mentor many students in classroom and lab settings spanning the United States, Denmark, and Norway. My current pedagogical interests include equity-focused research methods teaching, debunking popular psychology myths, and updating traditional assessment methods in the age of LLMs. For courses, syllabi, and materials, please see the Teaching & Mentoring tab.
Prior to my postdoctoral position and graduate studies, I received a BA in Economics and Psychology from Macalester College (Saint Paul, MN) and worked as a research analyst at The Brattle Group (Washington, DC). I grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY, a place primarily known for one of the longest walking bridges in the world, Vassar College, and an episode of Friends.
Contact: wmerrell@ps.au.dk