About me

I’m Soyeon, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I work with Dr. Nick Buttrick. I received my Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Michigan, where I worked with Dr. Josh Ackerman, and my M.A. in social psychology at Yonsei University with Dr. Eunkook Mark Suh. You can find my CV here.

Research

I study how people perceive features of their environments (e.g., disease prevalence, resource availability, population density) and how these perceptions shape their motives and goals in interpersonal relationships. To explore these questions across different social contexts, I use a variety of methods, including controlled experiments, observational studies, analyses of social network datasets, and agent-based simulations with large language models.

Publications

Choi, S., Lee, K., Sng, O., Ackerman, J. M. (2025). Infected Smallville: How disease threat shapes sociality in LLM agents. International Conference on Machine Learning 2025 Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems in the Era of Foundation Models. 🔗

Ackerman, J. M., Samore, T., Fessler, D. M. T., Kupfer, T. R., Choi, S., Merrell, W. N., Aarøe, L., Aavik, T., Acabado, S., Akello, G., Alfian, I. N., Al-Shawaf, L., Alvarez, M. M., Ammann, J., Arikan, G., Asha, S. A., Astobiza, A. M., Baeza-Ugarte, C. G., Barclay, P., … Žeželj, I. (2025). I see sick people: Beliefs about sensory detection of infectious disease are largely consistent across cultures. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 128, 737-750. 🔗

Merrell, W. M., Choi, S., & Ackerman, J. M. (2024). When and why people conceal infectious disease. Psychological Science, 35(3), 215-225. 🔗

Choi, S., Merrell, W. N., & Ackerman, J. M. (2023). Safety first, but for whom? Shifts in risk perception for self and others following COVID-19 vaccination. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 17(7), e12757. 🔗

Choi, S., Merrell, W. N., & Ackerman, J. M. (2022). Keep your distance: Different roles for knowledge and affect in predicting social distancing behavior. Journal of Health Psychology, 27(12), 2847-2859. 🔗

Ackerman, J. M., Merrell, W. N., Choi, S. (2020). What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 1, 100002. 🔗

Lee, D. I., Gardiner, G., Baranski, E., International Situations Project Members, & Funder, D. C. (2020). Situational experience around the world: A replication and extension in 62 countries. Journal of Personality, 88(6), 1091-1110. 🔗

Choi, S., & Suh, E. M. (2018). Retrospective time travel in life satisfaction judgment: A life history approach. Personality and Individual Differences, 129, 138-142. 🔗

Suh, E. M., & Choi, S. (2018). Predictors of subjective well-being across cultures. In E. Diener, S. Oishi, & L. Tay (Eds.), Handbook of Subjective Well-being. Salt Lake City, UT: DEF Publishers. 🔗