Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making

Nathanael Fast studies the psychological underpinnings of power, leadership, and technology adoption. His research examines how power and status hierarchies shape decision making, how people’s identities shape their professional networks, and how AI is shaping the future.

Fast is Director of the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making and Co-Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute.

He received his PhD in Organizational Behavior from Stanford University and has been recognized for both teaching and research, including USC’s Golden Apple Teaching Award, the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research, and Poets & Quants "best 40 B-school profs under the age of 40.

Juliana Schroeder is the Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values Professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.Schroeder is a behavioral scientist who researches the psychological processes by which people think about the minds of other people, particularly in workplace contexts. The attributions that people make about others’ minds are consequential because they underlie decisions about how to interact with others, such as whether to help or harm them. For instance, determining whether a negotiation partner is trustworthy affects willingness to cooperate. Determining whether an outgroup member is competent affects moral concern for their well-being. Schroeder uses experiments to understand how people make inferences about other minds, and test the consequences of their inferences.

Ravi Iyer is a technologist and academic psychologist working to improve technology's impact on society. He is currently the Research Director for the USC Marshall School's Neely Center.

I am fascinated by the ways in which technology can shape society. I've studied cognitive biases, misinformation, threats to democracy, and well-being for over 17 years, and have spent the past 7 plus years working to use technology to promote the social good by consulting with numerous companies, civil society organizations, and policymakers. In my role in the industry, I specialized in using behavioral data in novel ways to improve artificial intelligence and machine learning-based algorithms to identify and promote higher-quality civic, health, and news content in ranked feeds.

I am currently a Senior Advisor at the Psychology of Technology Institute, which is a project of the University of Southern California's Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making. As Senior Advisor, I am developing the Social Media Index, the first scientific attempt to compare the positive and negative experiences that people have across the most popular social media and communication platforms, managing and analyzing the data for a nationally representative and longitudinal panel survey of social media users in the United States, and advising product teams and policymakers on how to address problems on these platforms. I am a regular contributor to their blog Designing Tomorrow on Substack.

I am also a Visiting Fellow at the Integrity Institute, which is a non-profit organization comprised of people with on-platform experience building and monitoring potential harms on some of the most widely-used technology platforms in existence.