Wallenberg Foundation Grant for "Sustainability, Emotions and Intelligent Machines"

Victor Galaz, Stefan Daume and colleagues receives a 5,6 million SEK grant for the project: “Sustainability, Emotions and Intelligent Machines - the mechanisms, diffusion and effects of technology-mediated emotions on sustainability” from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. The project is a collaboration between researchers at Stockholm Resilience Centre (Stockholm University), the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) through Therese Lindahl, and the Emotion Lab at Karolinska Institutet through Andreas Olsson.

Project summary: Emotions are at the core of human experience. They affect our lives in profound ways, help us make sense of the world, affect what we pay attention to, and influence individual as well as collective attitudes and behavior. Emotions relate to sustainability in multiple ways. On the most basic level, emotions are strongly related to various dimensions of individual human decision-making, including risk perceptions, impacts on political polarization, and affect whether individuals choose to engage in collective action.

Digital platforms have expanded and restructured social networks in profound ways allowing affective information to move between the individual and collective level in new ways. At times, algorithmic systems may even exploit affective weaknesses in human cognition and technological systems in ways that undermine the ability of societies to act collectively. The project builds on insights from various scientific disciplines, and will combine controlled behavioral experiments, systematic literature reviews, expert surveys and computational social media analysis to explore the causal connections between emotions, technology and sustainability behavior.