Erik Wästlund, Professor of Psychology
Erik Wästlund was born and raised in Karlstad. He began his academic studies with social anthropology at the University of Gothenburg and then continued with psychology at Karlstad University. However, he finished his PhD at the University of Gothenburg since Karlstad University was yet to establish a PhD programme in psychology at the time.
"My research focuses on behaviour change and how to support people who want to change their habits, so they can actually implement the changes. It is essentially about decision making and how to adapt and use digital technology to simply the decision-making process for individuals. From a wider perspective, I am interested in how digital health innovations can help improve people’s quality of life and health."
Erik Wästlund is fascinated by human–technology interactions. Today, there are major flaws that make it harder for users to achieve what they want, and at the same time there is a lot of potential.
"My research can help empower individuals to make healthier choices and encourage society to adopt digital health innovations more widely. Complex societal challenges, such as health and wellbeing, can only be solved through the collaborative efforts of a large number of actors with different types of expertise. My research is highly interdisciplinary and often conducted in collaboration with external partners. I believe that we as a university will gradually increase our involvement in the EU’s research programmes. As such, research is in many ways a team sport. We need to collaborate both within the university and with the wider community."