“Humans and Machines,” Adam Waytz, Northwestern University

Event time: 
Monday, October 19, 2020 - 12:00pm through 1:15pm
Location: 
Online ()
Speaker: 
Adam Waytz, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Event description: 

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES WORKSHOP

Abstract: Everyday life is increasingly humanless, with robotic technology replacing human jobs and performing tasks previously reserved for humans. This talk will explore the psychological implications of an automated world and will address such questions as: whether online technology helps or hurts empathy, how anthropomorphism influences people’s trust and blame toward a self-driving car, how to mitigate discomfort over robots replacing human jobs, how automation contributes to political discord and unity, and why awareness of automation’s effect on employment increases negative sentiment toward immigrants. Together, this research suggests the importance of considering the psychological consequences of automation alongside its economic and technological consequences.

Adam Waytz is a psychologist and a professor of management and organizations in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He uses methods from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to study the causes and consequences of perceiving mental states in other entities and to investigate processes related to social influence, social connection, meaning-making, and ethics.
He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia University and a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Chicago, and he received a National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Health to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He is the first person to receive twice the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He is also the winner of the SAGE Young Scholar Award and the International Social Cognition Network’s Early Career Award, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

This virtual workshop is open to the Yale community only. To receive Zoom information, you must subscribe to the Behavioral Science Workshop at this link: https://csap.yale.edu/behavioral-sciences-workshop.

Cosponsored by the Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP) and the School of Management’s International Center for Finance and the Lynne & Andrew Redleaf Foundation.

Registration Info: 
You must subscribe to the Behavioral Sciences Workshop series using your Yale NetID to receive Zoom information for the virtual workshops.