Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Chicago business schools this week.
How Much Empathy Do You Feel When Powerful People Suffer? – Kellogg Insight
Northwestern Kellogg assistant professor of management and organizations Nour Kteily recently co-authored new research with Cornell University assistant professor Brian Lucas that explores how much empathy people experience when the factory floor worker suffers a pay cut compared to when the executive’s six-figure salary gets lobbed off.
Kteily writes, “The prevailing view has been that anti-egalitarians do not have it in them to empathize, and egalitarians are empathetic toward everyone.
Kteily’s research found that “when people read about victims with lower social status, egalitarians consistently expressed more empathy than people with anti-egalitarian views did. But when they read about victims with a higher socioeconomic standing, the opposite occurred. Participants who strongly favored a social hierarchy expressed more concern for victims like the wealthy executive than the egalitarians did.”
You can read the full article here.
Friend or Foe? Notre Dame Conference Explores Ethical Considerations of AI – Mendoza Ideas & News
Notre Dame University’s Mendoza College of Business recently announced “Artificial Intelligence and Business Ethics: Friends or Foes,” a fall 2018 conference sponsored by the Chase Manhattan Lecture Series, that “will explore the ethical issues arising from the use of AI in business and larger culture.”
Associate teaching professor in Mendoza’s IT, Analytics, and Operations Department Timothy Carone, who organized the conference, writes:
“The reason AI is so important is that it can make and implement decisions that heretofore were the purview of humans only. Over time, these decisions set up a pattern and it is this pattern we call ‘ethical behavior.’ We have only begun to explore the ethical implications to businesses of using AI to replace human decision-making and understand how to manage the new risks that come with this transformation.”
Featured speakers include:
- Daniel Fagella, the founder of daily newsletter TechEmergence, which serves as an industry source for business applications of AI.
- Martin Fiore, EY Americas Tax Talent leader who has explored the implications of AI in the tax, audit and talent acquisition areas.
- Otto Berkes, the chief technology officer for CA Technologies, one of the largest independent system software companies in the world.
- Ryan Welsh, founder and CEO of Kyndi, a venture-backed software company that is changing the paradigm of machine intelligence and how it’s used to solve some of the world’s hardest problems.
You can read the full article from Mendoza here.
Alan Dershowitz Shares His View on Key Legal and Ethical Issues – Gies College of Business News
High-profile lawyer and frequent contributor on FOX News and CNN, Alan Dershowitz, whose distinguished career in law has encompassed high-profile celebrity clients like Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, and O.J. Simpson, visited the University of Illinois this past April.
Controversial lawyer and political personality Alan Dershowitz recently spoke at the University of Illinois / Photo via NYT
Dershowitz used his lecture as an opportunity to “discuss and to answer questions about freedom of speech, professional ethics, attorney-client privilege, and a range of other topics,” such as “media issues, attorney-client privilege, conflict of interest, and comparative ethics” with students from the Gies College of Business and the U-IL College of Law.
“Ethics are very situational. As lawyers, we’ve all be told things by our clients that we can’t sleep at night keeping as secrets. You feel you have to tell somebody. And you can’t. I can’t tell my wife or my children. You go to the grave with these secrets. And if you don’t want to do that, you can’t become a very good lawyer.”
You can read the full article here.