Category: Uncategorized

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 6 August 2025 A question I occasionally get asked when teaching about stereotypes and prejudices is "where do they come from?". In purely neuropsychological terms, we will always experience a reaction to anything the brain observes as different, but that doesn't mean that you have a specific conviction about the group you assume...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 30 July 2025 A relatively common occurrence in the field of diversity is that different claims are made with varying degrees of credibility. At the least relevant end, you have individual stories, often with a lot of emotion and little generalisability. At the more interesting end, you have studies where the inferential statistics are...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 20 June 2025 When it comes to the science of diversity, it's relatively okay to communicate various findings from psychology, sociology, political science and so on. It's relatively easy to hear "fun things research shows that we can take with us". But something that constantly emerges as a challenge is the understanding...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 11 June 2025 The subject of diversity is a kind of continuous consideration of in-groups and out-groups, and how it affects being part of one or the other. But when it comes to organisational and team research in particular, it's very important to understand the concept of fault lines. To start off light and easy with...

Jakob Sverre Løvstad CTO, Seema 4 June 2025 By now, most people have probably heard of the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, originally described by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. The idea is simple in that when you know little about a field, you often don't have the self-awareness to realise how little you...

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...