Research directions
Link to Résumé
tinyurl.com/nicolassommet
Keywords
Psychology of income inequality - Psychology of competition - Psychology of social class - Achievement motivation - Well-being and health - Social trust - Multilevel modeling
Academic Biography
Nicolas Sommet received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Lausanne in 2014. His doctoral work focused on the structural antecedents and the interpersonal consequences of competitive goals.
After a first year of post-doctoral training at the University of Geneva (2014-15), he received a UNIL/CHUV mobility fellowship to study at the University of Rochester, NY (2015-16). He kept working on achievement motivation, while developing a line of inquiry on the psychology of inequality.
Then, Nicolas held a Junior Lecturer position at the NCCR LIVES (2016-20) and obtained a SNSF Ambizione fellowship to study the psychological effects of income inequality (2020-present) and a SNSF Spark fellowship (co-applicant) to conduct to study the psychological effect of social class (2019-present).
During these years, Nicolas used cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental data to investigate the effects of residing places with high income inequality on outcomes such as psychological health (Sommet et al., 2018), perceived competitiveness (Sommet et al., 2019), interracial outcomes (Gordils, Sommet, et al., 2020), social and institutional trust (Kim, Sommet, et al, 2021), and academic cooperativeness (Sommet et al., 2022). He also published two (supposedly) funny primers on multilevel linear and logistic modeling (Sommet et Morselli, 2017, 2021).
