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Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making

  • 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.

Mission

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.

Focus Areas

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.

The Neely Ethics & Technology Indices

We are thrilled to announce the launch of USC Marshall’s Neely Ethics & Technology Indices which will eventually include three nationally representative indices aimed at capturing people’s usage and experiences of harm and benefit across three critical technologies: social media, artificial intelligence, and mixed reality. Our first public results capture usage and experiences across common social media platforms. They represent the first public longitudinal, nationally representative panel of social media experiences in America, bringing critical data to important efforts to understand and improve society’s relationship to social media.

TOOLS + PROJECTS

  • Photograph of a stylized digital graph.

  • We collect monthly data from a representative sample of US households on usage of and attitudes toward artificial intelligence. We are developing questions on people’s experiences toward artificial intelligence.

    RESULTS Neely Artificial Intelligence Index
    NEWS

INSIGHT + ANALYSIS

EVENTS

  • Anticipating the Metaverse

  • Held at the University of Southern California on Friday, March 24, 2023, this workshop brought together leading experts in AR and VR to discuss the latest developments in the field of mixed reality as well as discuss the exciting opportunities and ethical challenges these technologies present. 

    The USC Marshall Neely Center for Ethics, the Psychology of Technology Institute, and the USC Institute for Creative Technologies partnered to organize a gathering of influential leaders and scholars to share personal insights and develop practices and principles that will be included in a white paper on the opportunities and ethics surrounding mixed reality.

NEWS

TEAM

  • Nathanael Fast

    Nathanael Fast
    • Jorge Paulo and Susanna Lemann Chair in Entrepreneurship
    • Associate Professor of Management and Organization
    • Director of the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making
    • Co-Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute

    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

    Juliana Schroeder

    • Affiliate Faculty Director

    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

    Ravi Iyer
    • Managing Director, Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making
    • Managing Director, Psychology of Technology Institute

    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.


  • Matt Motyl

    Matt Motyl

    • Senior Advisor

    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.

NETWORKS + RESEARCH

Build Peace Conference 2023

Organized by How to Build Up Inc., the Build Peace Conference aims to explore emergent challenges to peace in the digital era and introduces peacebuilding innovations to address these issues. The conference serves as an interdisciplinary forum for addressing critical topics and transformative practices in peace, conflict, and innovation. The USC Marshall Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making is pleased to serve as a sponsor of the Build Peace 2023 conference, which is scheduled to take place in Kenya from December 1 - 3, 2023. On Day 1 of the conference, the Neely Center will host a workshop on “Risks and Benefits of AI for a Global Community”. Learn more about Build Peace here.


HumanTech Summit 2023

The HumanTech Summit is an international scientific conference organized by the HumanTech Center at SWPS University. The Summit aims to connect people from different spheres of life and highlight the fact that neither technology without humans nor humans without technology can accomplish as much individually as they can when working together. The Neely Center is excited to support the HumanTech Summit 2023, slated to take place in Poland from December 9 - 10, 2023. Learn more about the Summit here.

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