Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making

Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making

Today's leaders are burdened with ever-growing expectations and dilemmas. The Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making provides them with tools at the intersection of ethics and technology so they can make wise decisions for their organizations while feeling confident about the future. In so doing, we aim to help solve what we believe to be the most difficult, but most important, challenge of our time: how to align emerging technologies with ethical, human-centered values.

Founded thanks to a generous endowment provided by USC Trustee Jerry Neely and his wife Nancy, the Neely Center’s mission is to guide leaders in making responsible decisions surrounding the development, implementation, and management of emerging technologies. By fostering and promoting cutting-edge research, comprehensive education, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, we strive to ensure that technological advancements contribute to both immediate and enduring societal benefits.

Our current work focuses on three technology-powered innovations poised to revolutionize business and society: 1) Social media platforms and their effects on individuals and communities around the world; 2) Artificial intelligence and its implications for human coordination and decision making; and 3) Immersive and mixed reality (AR/VR/XR) environments with the potential to enhance or detract from physical reality. In each case, we seek to steer these powerful tools toward their benefits and away from harms.

TOOLS + PROJECTS

To establish a first-of-its-kind public measure of user experiences with social media, we launched a nationally-representative longitudinal tracking survey assessing both positive and negative experiences across common platforms in the United States. The index will help to educate the public about the benefits and harms across different social media platforms, incentivize tech firms to create positive value for society, and inform scholarly debates about the impact of tech on society, including affective polarization, trust in institutions, and societal well-being.
The Neely Center is the lead sponsor of the Psychology of Technology Institute, a nonprofit initiative to bring together behavioral scientists, technology designers, and decision-makers to protect and improve psychological health for society by advancing our understanding and effective use of transformative technologies.

MORE Network to Advance Research on the Psychology of Technology
In collaboration with scholars from Berkeley’s Center for Human Compatible AI and the non-profit Build Up, we are reviewing evidence from both academic scholars and from platforms to summarize the effects of social media on polarization and conflict. The results will be published by Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute and presented at a conference in late April.

MORE Social Media's Effect on Polarization of Technology

INSIGHT + ANALYSIS

Interview: Nate Fast on How Do We Fix It?

FAST, associate professor of management and organization, joins the HDWFI podcast to discuss the role AI and emerging technologies play in human and societal development.

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW Interview: Nate Fast on How Do We Fix It?
When Should Platforms Optimize for Engagement?

Following a Wall St. Journal Article on the topic, Neely Center’s managing director, Ravi Iyer, talks about how platforms can improve their societal impact by removing ambiguous engagement signals from optimization functions.

MORE When Should Platforms Optimize for Engagement?
Interview: Nathanael Fast on LAist

FAST, associate professor of management and organization, joins AIRTALK to discuss how the rapid rise of AI-powered services are effecting not just business but our society at large.

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW Interview: Nathanael Fast on LAist
Article: AI is Taking Over Our Workplaces. Here’s How It Could Impact Human Psychology—and Vice Versa

NATHANAEL FAST, associate professor of management and organization, authored a piece for FAST COMPANY calls for a nuanced, collaborative relationship with AI in order to ensure a better future.

GO TO ARTICLE Article: AI is Taking Over Our Workplaces. Here’s How It Could Impact Human Psychology—and Vice Versa
Podcast: Improving Technology Through Design

Podcast Appearance on Lawfare’s Arbiters of Truth - Quinta and Alan spoke with Ravi Iyer about why he thinks that content moderation is a dead-end and why thinking about the design of technology is the way forward to make sure that technology serves us and not the other way around.

MORE Podcast: Improving Technology Through Design
Article: The Power To Do Harm

NATHANAEL FAST, associate professor of management and organization, co-authored an article with Jonathan Gratch of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies outlining how AI assistants could lead to unethical behavior and how to address these concerns.

MORE Article: The Power To Do Harm
Article: Improving Social Media's Impact in India

Most of the world’s population lives in the Global South, yet scholarly attention about technology’s impact often focuses on the US and Europe. At a conference in Michigan, on April 7-8, 2023, we presented design ideas that can improve the impact of social platforms in India, as well as other non-western contexts where companies may have trouble scaling moderation judgments.

MORE Article: Improving Social Media's Impact in India

NEWS + EVENTS

Nathanael Fast to Lead Neely Center

The new director of the USC Marshall Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making talks about his role and vision for the Center.

MORE Nathanael Fast to Lead Neely Center
Ethical Implications of AI

USC Neely Center’s fifth annual symposium takes a cross-disciplinary look at the ethical implications of artificial intelligence

MORE Ethical Implications of AI