About Us

The Psychology of Technology Institute (PTI) is a project of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. We are a non-profit network of behavioral scientists, technology designers, and decision-makers that protects and improves psychological health for society by advancing our understanding and effective use of transformative technologies. We focus on psychology because it is the core driver of individual and collective behavior; we focus on technology because it has powerful shaping effects on psychological health, at the individual and societal level. To solve grand challenges such as climate change and pandemics we must first master the technology-psychology relationship.

To achieve our mission, our network facilitates new partnerships and conversations across the tech ecosystem in order to ask better questions, find answers more quickly, and spread insights more efficiently among scientists, tech designers, policymakers, and end users. We refer to this work as the advancement of Technological Intelligence (TQ) – “the ability to build, manage, and use technology successfully to achieve outcomes that are beneficial for our collective psychological health. ”

Our current priorities center around three areas fundamental to the alignment of transformative technologies with psychology-enhancing values: repairing social media, promoting AI value alignment, and defining healthy mixed reality.

You can read more about us on our website.

Why subscribe?

We provide regular timely analyses of the latest research and news, leveraging our deep experience with both psychological research and building technology products. In a world where most of what AI systems are optimizing for are psychological in nature - affecting human behavior and well-being - our newsletter is a unique source of insight.

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You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. We hope to provide regular value whether you are a technologist seeking to optimize for the long term well-being of your users, an academic seeking to understand how research can better inform technology, a journalist looking for how to better tell the story of how technology is impacting people, a policy maker hoping to make more thoughtful regulations, or a technology user seeking to make the most informed decisions for you and your family.

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Be part of a community of people who share your interests. We hold regular events to help members connect with each other and leverage each other’s unique expertise.

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Advancing Technological Intelligence to improve the human-technology relationship

People

Ravi Iyer

Data Scientist & Moral Psychologist. Now @ http://PsychOfTech.org + USC Neely Center. Former Civic Integrity/AI/Newsfeed @ Facebook, Cofounder @ Ranker/CivilPolitics. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7vzqWBYAAAAJ&hl=en

Nate Fast

Prof at USC; Director of USC Marshall's Neely Center for Ethical Leadership; Co-founder & Co-Director, Psychology of Technology Institute