Navigating academia & researching morality: An interview with Matti Wilks

“The whole theme of my life has been, might as well give it a go, right?”

When setting out to plan a career in the abstract, it’s easy to underestimate the role of chance. But a lot of the time, a career path entails many unexpected encounters and simply seizing opportunities as they come. That describes the trajectory of Matti Wilks, a lecturer (assistant professor) in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Matti draws from social and developmental psychological approaches to study our moral motivations and actions. We recently chatted about her career journey, considerations on why someone might be a good fit for academia, and advice she’d give her younger self. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

From a bird’s eye view, how would you describe what you do?

My position is a lecturer, which is the equivalent of an assistant professor in the US. The biggest difference is that in the UK (for academic jobs) you become permanent after a year, so I am functionally tenured in that I have a permanent position. In theory, I spend 40% of my time doing research, 40% of my time teaching and 20% of my time doing admin. This is sometimes accurate, and sometimes not.

My research focuses on a broad range of topics. Right now, for example, I’m looking at which factors predict having an expansive moral circle—that is, caring about many different kinds of beings (distant people, animals, plants). I do a lot of work on attitudes towards cultured meat and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Everything falls under the broader question: What barriers might get in the way of us making the world better and reducing suffering?

What led you to this work? How did you think about your career when you were just starting out and what changed?

I completed my undergraduate degree in psychology in Australia at the University of Queensland. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I’d do with my career. I remember thinking that the only thing you could do with a psychology degree was to become a clinical psychologist, but I didn’t really see myself doing that. At that point, I didn’t even know that you could do research as a career.

In my third year of undergrad, I found comparative psychology (comparing human and animal cognition) and was completely taken with it. I started volunteering in research labs to gain experience and then wrote my honors thesis on social biases in children and chimpanzees. I was fascinated with this work, but still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my career long-term. I was in my early 20s at this point and kind of floating around. I wanted to make the world better and had always been interested in ethics and science, but I didn’t know what concrete opportunities were available. I wanted to work directly with animals, but thought I might have a better chance of having an impact if I studied people’s attitudes and behavior towards animals.

I ended up deciding to pursue a PhD. In Australia, you often go straight from undergrad to PhD, rather than doing a MSc. But I decided to take a year off. I did this to travel and take a break, but also because I wanted to improve my chances of getting funding for my PhD. Funding is very competitive and having a publication can really help your chances. I was fortunate to have a supervisor who supported me in publishing my honors project in an academic journal. This was particularly important for me because I didn’t receive first class honors for my degree. At the time, I remember it felt like it was a really big deal, but ultimately it didn’t really matter and it didn’t stop me from getting funding for my PhD or pursuing the career path that I wanted, which was a nice thing to learn.

At the time of applying for my PhD, I wanted to study the personality and cognitive factors that differentiate vegetarian children from non-vegetarian children. I had my whole PhD project about it mapped out in my mind. Then, while I was traveling for a few months, I happened to meet a neuroscientist in Greece. We only had a brief conversation, but I told him about my PhD plan and he pointed out that I already had an idea of what I wanted to find and pointed out that this might be a problem. 

I realized I was hoping to find that children who choose to become vegetarian were more morally motivated than non-vegetarian children. If I ended up finding something else (e.g., that they differed on another set of traits), then I could end up studying something that I wasn’t as excited about. The thing I actually cared about was morality. It was an unexpected encounter, but after talking to him, I decided to pivot and focus explicitly on morality for my dissertation.

I was enjoying my PhD and was interested in my research, but I didn’t really have a broader sense of what I was interested in contributing. Towards the end of the first year of my PhD I read the book The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer. I remember very distinctly sitting on my balcony reading about direct cash transfers [giving money to people living in poverty] and the organization GiveDirectly. At first I thought, “What if people spend money on the wrong thing?”. But as I thought this, I realized that I don’t know what someone else needs better than they do. It was a fantastic moment of noticing and acknowledging my own biases. Of course people know what’s better for them, and the evidence says that cash transfers are effective. 

This was a big learning moment for me. It was also when I first came across the ideas in the effective altruism movement, which had a big impact on my thinking. I already cared a lot about helping others (people and animals) and I cared about evidence and science a lot. But I didn’t really have a model for how you could put them together, or know that other people were already doing this. 

I became more involved with the EA community, but mostly in that it helped me find other people who were already thinking about evidence and impact and cared about a lot of the topics that I was interested in. That was a positive experience. However, at the time, a lot of the career advice in the community said I should have studied economics or philosophy. I was worried I’d done the wrong thing and felt quite disheartened that I had made a mistake in my career path. But eventually I decided that there was value in psychology and decided to continue on with this work. Over the past few years I’ve been figuring out how to align my research to impactful projects, especially as I’ve had more capacity to shape my own work.

As you neared the end of the PhD, how did this change in thinking influence your career prospects?

The year before I finished, I was still unsure about becoming an academic. I applied for a fellowship from the Australian Government that lets you study anywhere in the world for six months. I remember thinking this would be a practice application and I would try again the following year. But to my surprise, I was awarded the fellowship. It was great, but also quite intimidating. I thought, if I could study with anyone in the world who would it be? I reached out to the Philosophy Professor Peter Singer and he agreed to take me on.

Before I moved to the United States I spent a few months waiting for my PhD to be conferred and my visa to be processed. I ended up doing a summer internship with the Good Food Institute. It was a great experience and I learned a lot, but it was also the first time I’d really worked outside of academia and been assigned projects. I quickly learned how much I value autonomy in my research focus. 

Prior to being awarded the postdoc fellowship, I had also applied for a few non-academic jobs with places like the Good Food Institute and the Humane League. I did quite well in the interview process and had really positive experiences. It was very reassuring for me to realize, ‘Oh, people outside of academia do actually value my skill set.’ 

As a PhD student, it’s anxiety-provoking to wonder if anyone cares about your work or if you’ll ever get a job. A lot of people have bad PhD experiences. I was happy; I had a great advisor, friends in the program, and my quality of life was generally high. That made me feel positively about academia, but I’ve certainly always had doubts about my ability to make an impact in it.

Do you think it was mostly your personal fit that kept you in academia?

Honestly, it was more about opportunities I thought I would never have again. Once I had the fellowship to work with Peter Singer, I stopped considering other options. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I knew I had to give it a go. And before I moved to the United States, I was offered a second postdoc with Professor Paul Bloom at Yale. This was another once-in-a-lifetime type job, from my perspective. I was surprised but extremely happy to have these opportunities—ones I thought I couldn’t give up. I was still unsure about academia, but I knew I should try and see what would happen.

I was a postdoc with Peter Singer for six months at Princeton. It was my first exposure to philosophy because I had only ever been in a psychology department. I learned a lot about how much I didn’t know, which was a challenging but positive experience. Then I moved to Yale (New Haven) for two years to work with Paul Bloom. 

I was lucky and had a great postdoc experience with Paul. We got along really well and he gave me a lot of autonomy and freedom to pursue my own research interests, while still being supportive. He is still one of my favorite collaborators. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. 

One nice thing worth mentioning is that I was hired on a grant that was quite general, so we didn’t have a specific project to deliver. Postdocs are typically either funded on their own grant (like I did at Princeton), or on a faculty member’s grant (which is what I did at Yale). Sometimes a department will hire a postdoc, but that tends to be a bit less common in my experience. When you’re hired on a faculty member’s grant you often have a specific project you need to complete, so it can sometimes mean studying something that isn’t a perfect fit for you. I was lucky that Paul’s grant (and Paul) gave me the freedom to pursue my own research. That’s when I started doing a lot more moral consideration work. I had already been doing cultured meat work in Australia, but most of the stuff I do now was born out of my time at Yale.

What happens after post-doc? What was it like entering the job market?

At that point, I was on the fence. Do I apply for faculty positions or look for a non-academic position? I was in a reasonably strong position coming out of my postdoc, so I decided to give the academic job market a try. 

I was on the market for a year, which is quite a short period. I interviewed at three or four institutions, and I had two job offers. I had a lot of unsuccessful applications, too. I applied for ~10 positions in the US and I was only offered one or two interviews there. After a little while on the job market, I realized I didn’t necessarily want to stay in the US. The tenure track has a lot of pressure so you’re spending a lot of time over that five (or seven) years working, and it can be quite stressful. But it is important to me to have a life outside of work. I like to travel. I want to spend time with friends, family, and my partner. During my time on the job market, I came to realize that the tenure track wasn’t for me, so I started applying for positions outside of North America.

Eventually, I applied for and received an offer here at Edinburgh. We moved in November 2021. As a lecturer/faculty member, I am also the PI (Principal Investigator) for my own lab and supervise students and teach classes. I’ve even recently hired my first postdoc, which felt like quite a big step. Now, assuming I can get funding to support my work, I can mostly study whatever I want.

What does your day-to-day look like as a lecturer?

It depends a lot on the day. During the teaching semester, it’s mostly teaching, answering student emails, or preparing lectures. Outside of the semester, it’s much more flexible. Today, for example, I woke up and spent three hours writing a paper on artificial intelligence. That felt great, but I’ve been wanting to write that paper for over a year—so it’s a lot about carving out time to do this sort of thing.

My day usually looks like a combination of meeting with my students (I have ~six grad students in my lab), meeting with my collaborators, writing grants, or writing my own papers/research. Sometimes it’s running studies, but as you become more senior, you do less of the work putting together studies and more of advising other people on how to do it. I also have a surprising amount of unexpected conversations. To give some examples, I recently had an interview with Scientific American on Florida’s cultured meat ban, and I had a call with a film producer working on a short film about human-AI interaction. I give presentations and talk to people about research ideas and their careers. Increasingly, as I become more senior, I’m taking on administrative roles, which can take up quite a big chunk of time.

I’m assuming that, given the autonomy you have, you need to be able to work independently to succeed in academia. What do you think makes someone a good fit for the kind of work that you do?

If you’re somebody that wants to be told what to do, academia is probably not for you. If you’re somebody that wants to be told how to do things, academia is also probably not for you.

I think your first few years working as a faculty member are a big adjustment. As a postdoc, someone else is paying for your research and handling all the administrative side of things. Obviously, postdocs vary drastically based on your relationship with your advisor, but in a good postdoc you have a huge amount of time to do research. 

As a faculty member, you have so many more demands on you. I used to have a lot of time to think really deeply about ideas. Now my brain is usually pulled in 87 different ways. I think that a lot of people who do PhDs are perfectionists. Unfortunately once you are a faculty member you don’t have enough time to do everything perfectly. You need to learn to pick and choose where to invest your time. I’ve seen people try to do everything and if you don’t learn to say no you will likely burn out. So it’s really important to learn to set your own boundaries. 

You also get better at managing your time. In academia, there isn’t a guidebook for how to do things. It’s a lot of figuring things out. One of the most rewarding things about my job is working with really lovely collaborators. I have people who actually care about me and my career, and I care about them and their careers—independent of our research projects. I don’t think I would have stayed in academia had I not had such lovely colleagues. And I mention this because—so much of the job is figuring things out—you really do need that kind of support, especially when you’re starting out. 

Another thing that I love is the flexibility. I don’t find it interesting to focus on one thing for an extended period. I like to have several different projects to work on. Some academics do the same line of research for 20 years, but I know that isn’t for me. It’s possible to work on a range of topics, but that’s not the model that academia has followed historically. Talking to friends who have left academia, it seems like the pace is a bit faster but you have a lot less autonomy, so there are trade-offs. 

Another thing I think people neglect to talk about is the “academic passport.” It’s true that it can be hard to choose to live where you want as an academic. But I’ve been lucky to find a job in Edinburgh, which I think is a fantastic city. And because of my academic career, I had the chance to live in the US and now in the UK. That’s something that I wouldn’t have done if I had just taken a regular job and stayed in the town where I went to university and I think it’s a big pro in the academia column.

Zooming out, how do you think your academic work translates to real world social impact?

It still feels like an open question to me. I have a few different models of ways to have an impact in academia. One approach is through teaching. You won’t necessarily impact as many people in this path, but if you teach about a topic or an idea that really resonates with people it can change their views and have an impact that way. Alternatively, you can do research that changes the field. There are people whose program of research has changed entire fields of study and which has flowed over into society. Or you can be a public intellectual and communicate ideas directly. Unfortunately it can take a long time to figure out if you will have any of these kinds of impact, especially for the latter two paths. Most people aren’t doing field-changing work or being internationally influential in the first few years of their career. 

It’s hard to know if your own work will be impactful, or how much impact is enough. It’s statistically unlikely that you will be at the top of your field or be a very influential public intellectual. But some people have told me that my work has influenced them, which is nice to hear. And I think that my research often focuses on pretty novel questions, which can be a good way to try to change norms and focus in the field, even if it’s on a smaller scale. 

In the future, I’d be excited to research moral change. A lot of existing research describes the moral circle, but there is much less on the processes we go through when we actually change our moral beliefs. There’s also research that seems neglected within the intersection of artificial intelligence and psychology that I’d like to try to push forward. 

I’m not convinced that academia is necessarily the most impactful path for everybody. In some cases, it can be better to build skills in academia and then apply those skills elsewhere. As an example, I teach a course on applying psychological research to global problems. We start with asking what we know about psychology and then look at how (and if) this can help us with global issues such as climate change or factory farming. Each week we look at a different problem and how we might apply psychology to it.

What advice would you give a younger version of yourself?

When I went into a PhD, it was because I didn’t know what else to do. I certainly don’t regret doing it, and I am happy with where it’s taken me, but I don’t necessarily think it’s the best path for everyone. And there are things you give up by doing a PhD first. 

At the end of my PhD, I thought to myself “Maybe I will go and try working on something else.” But at the time I didn’t realize that once you finish a PhD you’re only eligible for certain grants and opportunities for x number of years after the program—the clock is ticking. And once you leave academia it can often be quite hard to come back.

I usually give the advice to do the other things first because you can always come back. I think people are often more ready to complete a PhD when they’ve gone out and worked for a couple of years first. When I started, I didn’t have a good idea about what my values were or what I wanted to do with my research long-term. It’s not always better, but there’s certainly value in knowing who you are and what you care about before you make a decision about academia. On the other hand, it’s a great job. It has a lot of flexibility and freedom, both in terms of what you work on and what your day-to-day life looks like. It’s silly, but I appreciate that I can go for walks whenever I feel like it or decide to take Monday off and work Saturday instead. I can also travel and work remotely sometimes. I don’t want to tell people not to try academia, but if you’re deciding between a PhD and something else I usually recommend trying something else first.

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