
Dr Matti Wilks is a Lecturer in Psychology. Prior to this she completed her PhD at the University of Queensland and was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and Yale Universities. Dr Wilks uses approaches in social and developmental psychology to understand our moral motivations and actions.
Currently, my work mostly focuses on the moral circle; who we do and do not think of as worthy of moral concern. I am particularly interested in moral concern for distant others, such as people who are distant from us (physically, culturally, temporally), non-human animals, and artificial entities. I aim to understand the factors that shape our moral circles, how they change across development, and why some people appear to be exceptionally motivated to care for distant others. In other work I also examine the natural-is-better bias. That is, why we think natural things are good and unnatural things are bad. I apply this work in the context of green technology, such as understanding consumer attitudes towards cultured meat.