Academic Bio

Nicolas Sommet received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Lausanne in 2014. His doctoral work examined the structural antecedents and interpersonal consequences of competitive goals (Sommet et al., 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017; for a review, see Butera et al., 2019).

After one year of post-doctoral training at the University of Geneva (2014-15), he was awarded a UNIL/CHUV mobility fellowship to study at the University of Rochester, NY (2015-16). He continued his work on achievement motivation (Sommet & Elliot, 2017) and began a research program on inequality..

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He then served as a Junior Lecturer position at the NCCR LIVES (2016-20) and secured a SNSF Ambizione fellowship to study the psychological effects of income inequality (2020-2024). During these years, he used cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental data to examine how living in more economically unequal places relate to health, well-being, trust, and competitiveness (for a review of these findings, see Sommet & Elliot, 2023), and he recently published a meta-analysis on that topic in Nature (Sommet et al., 2025).

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Recently, he was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project “The Vicious Cycle of Inequality: How Economic Inequality Perpetuates Itself by Creating a Culture of Competitiveness in Schools” (2026-2031)

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He is also a co-applicant on a SNSF Spark fellowship (received in 2019) through which he co-first-authored a 2025 paper in Nature Human Behaviour (Batruch, Sommet, & Autin, 2025)

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Nicolas also published two humorous but rigorous primers on multilevel linear and logistic modeling (Sommet & Morselli, 2017, 2021), a primer on fixed-effects modeling for longitudinal analysis (Sommet & Lipps, 2025) and co-developed a method and a web-app to facilitate power calculations when testing an interaction (Sommet et al., 2024).

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Nicolas now holds a permanent research position at the LIVES Centre at the University of Lausanne.