Pontus Strimling

Karl Palmås, Mats Benner, Monica Billger et al.

Breakthrough technologies increasingly shape social institutions, economic systems, and political futures. Yet models of research excellence associated with such technologies often prioritize technical performance, scalability, and short-term innovation metrics while treating ethical, social, and cultural dimensions as secondary considerations. This perspective article argues that such separation is no longer tenable. We propose a broader understanding of excellence that combines technical rigor with ethical robustness, social intelligibility, and long-term relevance. The rapid emergence of generative and agentic artificial intelligence further underscores this argument. As technological systems increasingly operate through language, interpretation, and normative alignment, expertise traditionally cultivated in the humanities and social sciences becomes integral to the design, governance, and responsible deployment of such systems. Drawing on historical examples and contemporary research practices, this article examines five interconnected domains where the humanities and social sciences, treated as integrated dimensions of research practice, can strengthen technological development: (1) ethical, legal, and social integration in agenda-setting and research design; (2) plural and reflexive foresight practices that shape technological futures; (3) graduate education as a leverage point for cross-disciplinary literacy; (4) visualization and communication as epistemic and civic practices; and (5) institutional frameworks that move beyond rigid distinctions between basic and applied research. Across these dimensions, we propose practical strategies for embedding interdisciplinary collaboration structurally rather than symbolically.

Kimmo Eriksson, Simon Karlsson, Irina Vartanova et al.

As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms society, developers and policymakers struggle to anticipate which applications will face public moral resistance. We propose that these judgments are not idiosyncratic but systematic and predictable. In a large, preregistered study (N = 587, U.S. representative sample), we used a comprehensive taxonomy of 100 AI applications spanning personal and organizational contexts-including both functional uses and the moral treatment of AI itself. In participants' collective judgment, applications ranged from highly unacceptable to fully acceptable. We found this variation was strongly predictable: five core moral qualities-perceived risk, benefit, dishonesty, unnaturalness, and reduced accountability-collectively explained over 90% of the variance in acceptability ratings. The framework demonstrated strong predictive power across all domains and successfully predicted individual-level judgments for held-out applications. These findings reveal that a structured moral psychology underlies public evaluation of new technologies, offering a powerful tool for anticipating public resistance and guiding responsible innovation in AI.

Pontus Strimling, Simon Karlsson, Irina Vartanova et al.

A fundamental question in cognitive science concerns how social norms are acquired and represented. While humans typically learn norms through embodied social experience, we investigated whether large language models can achieve sophisticated norm understanding through statistical learning alone. Across two studies, we systematically evaluated multiple AI systems' ability to predict human social appropriateness judgments for 555 everyday scenarios by examining how closely they predicted the average judgment compared to each human participant. In Study 1, GPT-4.5's accuracy in predicting the collective judgment on a continuous scale exceeded that of every human participant (100th percentile). Study 2 replicated this, with Gemini 2.5 Pro outperforming 98.7% of humans, GPT-5 97.8%, and Claude Sonnet 4 96.0%. Despite this predictive power, all models showed systematic, correlated errors. These findings demonstrate that sophisticated models of social cognition can emerge from statistical learning over linguistic data alone, challenging strong versions of theories emphasizing the exclusive necessity of embodied experience for cultural competence. The systematic nature of AI limitations across different architectures indicates potential boundaries of pattern-based social understanding, while the models' ability to outperform nearly all individual humans in this predictive task suggests that language serves as a remarkably rich repository for cultural knowledge transmission.

Pontus Strimling, Joel Krueger, Simon Karlsson

Prior research demonstrates that Open AI's GPT models can predict variations in moral opinions between countries but that the accuracy tends to be substantially higher among high-income countries compared to low-income ones. This study aims to replicate previous findings and advance the research by examining how accuracy varies with different types of moral questions. Using responses from the World Value Survey and the European Value Study, covering 18 moral issues across 63 countries, we calculated country-level mean scores for each moral issue and compared them with GPT-4's predictions. Confirming previous findings, our results show that GPT-4 has greater predictive success in high-income than in low-income countries. However, our factor analysis reveals that GPT-4 bases its predictions primarily on a single dimension, presumably reflecting countries' degree of conservatism/liberalism. Conversely, the real-world moral landscape appears to be two-dimensional, differentiating between personal-sexual and violent-dishonest issues. When moral issues are categorized based on their moral domain, GPT-4's predictions are found to be remarkably accurate in the personal-sexual domain, across both high-income (r = .77) and low-income (r = .58) countries. Yet the predictive accuracy significantly drops in the violent-dishonest domain for both high-income (r = .30) and low-income (r = -.16) countries, indicating that GPT-4's one-dimensional world-view does not fully capture the complexity of the moral landscape. In sum, this study underscores the importance of not only considering country-specific characteristics to understand GPT-4's moral understanding, but also the characteristics of the moral issues at hand.