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Adam Waytz

Morris and Alice Kaplan Chair in Ethics and Decision Management Professor of Management & Organizations at Kellogg School of Management

Schools

  • Kellogg School of Management

Expertise

Links

Biography

Kellogg School of Management

Adam Waytz is the Morris and Alice Kaplan Chair in Ethics and Decision Mangement and professor of Management and Organizations. His research uses methods from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to study the causes and consequences of perceiving mental states in other agents and to investigate processes related to social influence, social connection, meaning-making, and ethics. Professor Waytz's research has been published in leading journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Review. In recognition of his work, Professor Waytz received the 2008 and 2013 Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the SAGE Foundation Young Scholar Award, and the International Social Cognition Network's Early Career Award. He was also a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation from 2018-2019. Professor Waytz received his BA in Psychology from Columbia University, his PhD in social psychology from the University of Chicago, and received a National Service Research Award from the National Institute of Health to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University.

Research Interests

Ethics and morality, Mind perception, Dehumanization, Social connection, Meaning-making, Social influence, Human-Technology Interaction

Education

  • Ph.D., 2009, Psychology, University of Chicago
  • M.A., 2006, Psychology, University of Chicago
  • B.A., 2003, Psychology, Columbia University, Summa Cum Laude

Academic Positions

  • Associate Professor, Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2015-2020
  • Assistant Professor, Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2011-2015
  • NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology, Harvard University, 2009-2011

Awards

  • Chair's Core Course Teaching Award, Kellogg School of Management
  • Profiled for Faculty Excellence In Research for Northwestern Research magazine
  • Outstanding Case on Anti-Corruption (with Vasilia Kilibarda), North American Case Research Association
  • Sage Young Scholar Award, Society for Personality & Social Psychology & the Foundation for Personality & Social Psychology
  • Early Career Award, International Social Cognition Network
  • Theoretical Innovation Prize, Society for Personality and Social Psychology
  • Named to the Best 40 B-School Profs Under the Age of 40, Poets and Quants
  • Participant in Edge.org Annual Question, edge.org
  • Theoretical Innovation Prize, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Editorial Positions

  • Associate Editor, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2020
  • Editorial Board, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017
  • Editorial Board Member, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2015

Teaching Interests

  • Values-based Leadership
  • Leadership in Organizations
  • Ethics and Executive Leadership

Videos

Courses Taught

Beyond Diversity


Kellogg School of Management


Chicago, Illinois, United States


Jun 24

Read about executive education

Cases

Waytz, Adam and Vasilia Kilibarda. 2014. Through the Eyes of a Whistle-Blower: How Sherry Hunt Spoke Up About Citibank’s Mortgage Fraud. Case 5-214-256 (KEL852).

In 2011, Sherry Hunt was a vice president and chief underwriter at CitiMortgage headquarters in the United States. For years she had been witnessing fraud, as the company bought billions of dollars in mortgage loans from external lenders that did not meet Citi credit policy and sold them to government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This resulted in Citi selling to GSEs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pools of loans that were considerably defective and thus likely to default. Citi had also approved hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of defective mortgage files for U.S. Federal Housing Administration insurance. After reporting the mortgage defects in regular reports, notifying and working closely with her direct supervisor (who was subsequently asked to leave Citi after alerting the chairman of the board to these issues) to stop the purchase of defective loans, leaving anonymous tips on the FBI’s and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s websites, and receiving threats from two of her superiors who demanded that she change the results of her quality control unit’s reports, the shy and conflict-avoidant Hunt had to decide who she should tell about the fraud, and how.

The case gives students the opportunity to recommend how Hunt should proceed based on their analysis of the stakeholders involved. To aid instructors, the case includes Kellogg-produced videos of Hunt—the only on-camera interviews she has ever given—explaining what happened after she reported the fraud to Citi HR and, later, the U.S. Department of Justice. Within the case, students are also briefly exposed to legislation and bodies pertinent to whistle-blowing in the United States, including the Dodd-Frank Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the SEC Office of the Whistleblower.

This case won the 2014 competition for Outstanding Case on Anti-Corruption, supported by the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), an initiative of the UN Global Compact.

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