Author: Jakob Sverre Løvstad

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 28 May 2025 Today's article is based on one of my favourites in psychological research, the recently deceased Bob Altemeyer (or Robert Anthony Altemeyer, for the pedantic). Altemeyer spent his life researching authoritarian personalities, initially called "right-wing authoritarians" (RWA). This is in the tradition of a number of researchers...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 21 May 2025 My experience so far is that "cognitive dissonance" is a term that many people have heard of. In any case, many people raise their hands when I talk about the phenomenon at various courses and I ask if the audience is familiar with it. At the same time, it's probably...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 14 May 2025 A common question when we talk about diversity and different groups is, in a way, "what is the truth?". In a field (and a society?) often characterised by many emotions, it can be a little easy to trudge along in a direction in your head that is not...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 8 May 2025 To understand today's article, it's a good idea (!) to read my previous article on "Stereotype Content Model" (SCM). Otherwise, this will be left hanging in the air. The reason is that prejudices roughly follow exactly the same logic as stereotypes, but you then take away the...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 30 April 2025 In this growing saga of how we treat those who are different, the influence of stress is yet another factor that seems to exacerbate the situation. This is perhaps especially important since most of the people we talk to through our own work in the field are people with above-average...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 23 April 2025 I think I should start by pointing out that stereotypes are a consequence of our highly necessary habit of categorising each other as people. Even though the term stereotypes is often used in a negative sense in today's society, from a purely psychological point of view it is only an association with groups...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 16 April 2025 Today's programme in the series "Snippets from Social Psychology" (TM) is about Social Dominance Theory (SDT), an idea with associated empirical evidence that first saw the light of day in 1992 under the auspices of psychology researchers Jim Sidanius, Erik Devereux, and Felicia Pratto. The very basic observation here is that people...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 9 April 2025 I'll allow myself a little tabloid joke in the headline here, but let me also say that the research here is solid despite the light-hearted language. To take the main scientific finding first: It turns out that when we humans are exposed to the risk of infection and disease, we...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 2 April 2025 In all humility, I would argue that it is almost impossible to talk about diversity in any meaningful way without understanding at least the basics of Social Identity Theory (SI). SI came about when Henry Tajfel published his first article in 1959, and later...

Manav Rihel Kumar CEO, Seema 6 March 2025 DEI built on a dubious foundation becomes an easy target. This is an opportunity to get things right. We have been following the DEI-movement for two decades. Even though our expertise comes from the Nordic context, we have always glanced at other countries to understand the DEI...