Wolfgang Wagner (born 1949 in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian social psychologist, currently professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Tartu, Estonia.

He trained in sociology at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies and took the position of Assistant Professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz 1979 where he also received his habilitation.

In his professional publications, Wolfgang Wagner covers a wide range of social psychological topics that have to do with the interaction of individual and collective processes.

Hence, he suggested the existence of a system of holomorphic or meta-representations that encompass not only an individual's or a group's representation of an issue but also bits and pieces of the adversary's view of the world.

Together with George Gaskell, Martin Bauer, Nicole Kronberger and others Wagner worked on how the European public responded to the introduction of genetically modified organisms, which resulted in a number of key publications [9][10][11][12][13][14] Wolfgang Wagner, together with Nicole Kronberger and Peter Holtz, extended the framework of Social Representation Theory by including Psychological Essentialism as a hitherto overlooked representational tool in thinking about natural organisms and social groups.