Bio

I'm Will Gervais, currently a Social Psychology Ph. D. candidate at the University of British Columbia. Next year, I'm off to Lexinton, KY to begin my career as an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kentucky. What will I do there, you ask?

Broadly, I’m interested in how cognition, evolution, and culture interact to shape people’s beliefs about the world. My research draws upon a wide variety of subfields within psychology, including social cognition, prejudice/stereotyping, reasoning, evolutionary psychology, and cultural psychology.

To me, some of the most interesting questions about human psychology involve supernatural thinking: Why do people tend to hold unverifiable supernatural beliefs? What cognitive, evolutionary, and cultural forces facilitate belief in counterintuitive supernatural agents? How do beliefs about supernatural agents in turn affect cognition, evolution, and culture? Why do some people believe in gods? Why do other people not believe in gods? What are the psychological causes and consequences of religious (dis)belief? Why are atheists disliked?

This research program also informs basic theory on classic social psychological topics including the nature of prejudice, the role of intuition and analytic processing in reasoning about the world, and the ways that awareness of other social agents can affect cognition and behavior.

Aside from the academic stuff, I grew up in a small town in the mountains of Colorado. I enjoy soccer, biking, kayaking, travel, cooking, and camping.