My name is Pontus Strimling.
I am a research leader at the Institute For Futures studies and professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University
My research deals with how cultural traits change over time. In particular, with how norms and opinions are created, sustained and transformed. My goal is to further the understanding of cultural change to the point where it can be used to predict and even transform the outcome of real-world cultural change. I’m interested in understanding both individual, and population level changes. To grasp cultural transmissions on an individual level, I use experiments and surveys. I then use formal models to aggregate these into predictions concerning exactly how culture changes in populations. Large-scale databases such as the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, are subsequently used in testing these predictions.
I’m also on the board of the Global Social Norms network, which coordinates global studies on opinion change and norm development. If you would like to become part of the network and collect data in your country or region. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. We are especially keen on collaborating with collaborators in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Lately I have also conducted work on AI and technology spread. You can read more about my research group’s work here.
As an introduction to my work here is a talk I gave on the rise of modern values. It’s old, but the basis is still relevant.
And here is a talk on some coming effects of Artificial Intelligence
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