Samuel Wilson
Papers
2
Total Citations
39
H-Index
2
About
Samuel Wilson is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of social psychology, bioethics, and the philosophy of human nature. His scholarship has made meaningful contributions to our understanding of how people conceptualize humanness — a deceptively complex question with profound implications for contemporary debates in biotechnology and ethics. Wilson's most influential work, "Is the Future more or less Human? Differing Views of Humanness in the Posthumanism Debate" (2009, 30 citations), tackled a critical gap in bioethical discourse: the absence of a clear, shared definition of humanness. By drawing on social psychological research into folk concepts of humanness and dehumanization, Wilson and his collaborators brought empirical rigor to a debate that had long suffered from conceptual ambiguity. This interdisciplinary approach — bridging psychological science and philosophical ethics — remains one of his defining intellectual contributions. His subsequent work, "Humanness Beliefs about Behavior: An Index and Comparative Human-Nonhuman Behavior Judgments" (2012, 9 citations), extended this inquiry by developing measurable frameworks for assessing how people distinguish human from non-human behavior. Together, these works establish Wilson as a thoughtful and methodologically innovative voice in the ongoing conversation about what it means — and what it will mean — to be human.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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