Biography
Filip Olsson is a Max Weber Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Stockholm University and has a background in psychology and political science. Before joining the EUI, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. As a PhD student, he was also a visiting researcher at Waseda University and UCLA.
His previous work examined how social environments shape implicit and pre-conscious attitudes, understood as the intuitions, associations, and gut reactions that inform perception and judgement. Drawing on laboratory, field, and natural experiments, he has studied implicit nationalism, right-wing populism, and prejudice.
At the EUI, his research extends this interest in attitude formation to the broader role of culture and cultural narratives. His current projects examine how stereotypes are reproduced in television and film, how distinctions between good and bad taste are constructed, and how physical attributes, such as tattoos, shape perceptions of social worth and character. He also studies labour market discrimination, with a particular focus on how the introduction of AI into recruitment processes affects gender and ethnic inequality.