Wenhao Dai (University of California, Davis, B.A., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, M.S. & Ph.D.) is a social and experimental psychologist. Dr. Dai’s research studies how people form and shift social action and inaction goals, and how these goals impact their feelings, attitudes, interpersonal closeness, and health-related outcomes. The main research questions he studies include: How does social action impact our feeling of closeness towards others? Do people feel closer to those to whom they respond when they respond to a few or a lot of people? Can loneliness be the result of too many instead of too few social interactions? Is it easier to shift from action to inaction or inaction to action goals? His research mainly utilizes experiments, correlational surveys, and meta-analyses. At Lawrence, he teaches classes on social psychology, the self, research method, and cultural psychology.
