Biography

Michael J. Prietula (PhD, MPH) is Professor in the Goizueta Business School and in the Rollins School of Public Health. Dr. Prietula holds a PhD in Information Systems (minors in Computer Science and Psychology) from the University of Minnesota, and a Master of Public Health (MPH) from the University of Florida. He has worked as a research scientist at Honeywell's Aerospace Systems & Research Center, on the faculties of Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon University, and department chair at the Johns Hopkins University with an adjunct appointment in the JHU School of Medicine. He is also an External Research Scholar at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, that develops pioneering technologies aimed at leveraging and extending human capabilities via Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.

He has published such journals as the Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Cognitive Science, Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, Biosecurity & Bioterrorism, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, ORSA Journal on Computing, Applied Artificial Intelligence, JMIR mHealth & uHealth, Human Factors, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior, PLoS One, Brain Connectivity, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. He has best paper awards from the Hawaii International Conference of Systems Sciences, the International Conference on Global Defense & Business Continuity, the International Conference of Information Systems, and the Academy of Management. His papers were in the top 5 downloaded from Organization Science (2014), the most downloaded paper from Brain Connectivity (2017), and in top 10 downloaded from JMIR mHealth & uHealth (2016-2019). He has edited two books, Computational Organization Theory (with K. Carley) and Simulating Organizations: Computational Models of Institutions and Groups (with K. Carley & L. Gasser). He has been funded by Emory's Global Health Institute, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Michael is a musician, a PADI diving instructor, and was also a stage manager and served on the board of directors for a community theatre in New Hampshire while teaching at Dartmouth.

Education

  • PhD in Information Systems
    University of Minnesota
  • MPH in Public Health
    University of Florida

Using ADAPT-ITT to Modify a Telephone-Based HIV Prevention Intervention for SMS Delivery: Formative Study

JMIR Formative Research
African American adolescent females are disproportionately affected by sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV. Given the elevated risk of STIs and HIV in African American women, there is an urgent need to identify innovative strategies to enhance the adoption and maintenance of STI and HIV preventive behaviors. Texting is a promising technology for creating preventive maintenance interventions (PMIs) that extend the efficacy of the original intervention. However, little guidance in public health literature is available for developing this type of application. We describe a method (ADAPT-ITT) and a formative pilot that incorporates user experience design methods to adapt an evidence-based intervention (Afiya) to include a PMI texting component. We found that the use of existing EBIs incorporating telephone-based PMI scripts facilitated the initial design of the texts, with a subsequent narrative analysis of the advisory board data providing additional adjustments given the actual context. Additional examination of the advisory board feedback revealed that defined personas offer insight into and opportunities for a persona-specific modification of texting narratives. This research was supported by a grant from Emory University’s Global Health Institute and the Goizueta Business School’s Summer Research Fund.

Studies of Expertise from Psychological Perspectives: Historical Foundations and Recurrent Themes

Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, 2nd Edition
This chapter emphasizes a period of research roughly from the mid-1950s into the 1980s when empirical laboratory studies of expert reasoning were first combined with theoretical models of human thought processes that could reproduce the observable performance. It characterizes some of the enduring insights about mechanisms and aspects of expertise that generalize across domains, reflecting on the original theoretical accounts. There were three main roots that play an important role in the field of expertise: artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive psychology, and education. During the early years, the first AI program, called the logic theorist, was written. Cognitive Psychology and Computer Science merged into a very close collaboration that was named Cognitive Science. Expert cognition was conceived as the "goal state" for education, the criterion for what the successful educational process should produce, as well as a measure by which to assess its progress, serving to inform pedagogical design and teacher evaluation. When knowledge is viewed as the primary source of difference associated with expertise, as was the primary focus in the expert-novice approach, it makes sense to study the structure of individuals' knowledge.

Taking mHealth Forward: Examining the Core Characteristics

JMIR MHealth and UHealth
The emergence of mobile health (mHealth) offers unique and varied opportunities to address some of the most difficult problems of health. As this technology has spread, and as this technology is still evolving, we begin a conversation about the core characteristics of mHealth relevant to any mobile phone platform. We assert that the relevance of these characteristics to mHealth will endure as the technology advances, so an understanding of these characteristics is essential to the design, implementation, and adoption of mHealth-based solutions. The core characteristics we discuss are (1) the penetration or adoption into populations, (2) the availability and form of apps, (3) the availability and form of wireless broadband access to the Internet, and (4) the tethering of the device to individuals. These collectively act to both enable and constrain the provision of population health in general, as well as personalized and precision individual health in particular. This work was funded in part by a grant from Emory University’s Global Health Institute

SimEOC: A Distributed Web-Based Virtual Emergency Operations Center Simulator for Training and Research

International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management
Training is an integral part of disaster preparedness. Practice in dealing with crises improves one’s ability to manage emergency situations. As an emergency escalates, more and more agencies get involved, many of whom would not normally work together. These agencies require critical training to learn how to manage the crisis and to work together across jurisdictional boundaries. In many jurisdictions, training is conducted through discussion-based tabletop and paper-based scenario performance exercises or generic forms of computer-based exercises. In this paper, we describe a socio-technical computer-based training simulator and research tool for upper-level emergency managers. This tool is important because it enables emergency managers to configure the simulation to fit their emergency operations form. This allows training for crises more efficiently and effectively in a virtual environment. It also serves as a research tool for scientists to study emergency management decision-making, infrastructural design, and organizational learning. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Conforming Brain and Deontological Resolve

PLOS ONE
Our personal values are subject to forces of social influence. Deontological resolve captures how strongly one relies on absolute rules of right and wrong in the representation of one’s personal values and may predict willingness to modify one’s values in the presence of social influence. Using fMRI, we found that a neurobiological metric for deontological resolve based on relative activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) during the passive processing of sacred values predicted individual differences in conformity. Individuals with stronger deontological resolve, as measured by greater VLPFC activity, displayed lower levels of conformity. We also tested whether responsiveness to social reward, as measured by ventral striatal activity during social feedback, predicted variability in conformist behavior across individuals but found no significant relationship. From these results we conclude that unwillingness to conform to others’ values is associated with a strong neurobiological representation of social rule. This research was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Open collaboration for innovation: principles and performance

Organization Science
The principles of open collaboration for innovation (and production), once distinctive to open source software, are now found in many other ventures. Some of these ventures are Internet based: for example, Wikipedia and online communities. Others are off-line: they are found in medicine, science, and everyday life. Such ventures have been affecting traditional firms and may represent a new organizational form. Despite the impact of such ventures, their operating principles and performance are not well understood. Here we define open collaboration (OC), the underlying set of principles, and propose that it is a robust engine for innovation and production. In all instances, participants create goods and services of economic value, they exchange and reuse each other’s work, they labor purposefully with just loose coordination, and they permit anyone to contribute and consume. These principles distinguish OC from other organizational forms, such as firms or cooperatives. We identify and investigate three elements that affect performance: the cooperativeness of participants, the diversity of their needs, and the degree to which the goods are rival (subtractable). Through computational experiments, we find that OC performs well even in seemingly harsh environments: when cooperators are a minority, free riders are present, diversity is lacking, or goods are rival. We conclude that OC is viable and likely to expand into new domains. The findings also inform the discussion on new organizational forms, collaborative and communal. This project was supported by a summer Research grant from the Goizueta Business School, Emory University, and discussions at the Human Social, Culture and Behavior Modeling Program meetings of the Office of Naval Research.

Short-and long-term effects of a novel on connectivity in the brain

Brain Connectivity
We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. On the days after the reading, significant increases in connectivity were centered on hubs in the left angular/supramarginal gyri and right posterior temporal gyri. These hubs corresponded to regions previously associated with perspective taking and story comprehension, and the changes exhibited a time course that decayed rapidly after the completion of the novel. Long term changes in connectivity, which persisted for several days after the reading, were observed in bilateral somatosensory cortex, suggesting a potential mechanism for ‘‘embodied semantics.’’ This project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits. This research was supported by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through the Office of Naval Research.

How knowledge transfer impacts performance: A multilevel model of benefits and liabilities

Organization Science
When does knowledge transfer benefit performance? Combining field data from a global consulting firm with an agent-based model, we examine how efforts to supplement one’s knowledge from coworkers interact with individual, organizational, and environmental characteristics to impact organizational performance. We find that once cost and interpersonal exchange are included in the analysis, the impact of knowledge transfer is highly contingent. Depending on specific characteristics and circumstances, knowledge transfer can better, matter little to, or even harm performance. Three illustrative studies clarify puzzling past results and offer specific boundary conditions: (1) At the individual level, better organizational support for employee learning diminishes the benefit of knowledge transfer for organizational performance. (2) At the organization level, broader access to organizational memory makes global knowledge transfer less beneficial to performance. (3) When the organizational environment becomes more turbulent, the organizational performance benefits of knowledge transfer decrease. The findings imply that organizations may forgo investments in both organizational memory and knowledge exchange, that wide-ranging knowledge exchange may be unimportant or even harmful for performance, and that organizations operating in turbulent environments may find that investment in knowledge exchange undermines performance rather than enhances it. At a time when practitioners are urged to make investments in facilitating knowledge transfer and collaboration, appreciation of the complex relationship between knowledge transfer and performance will help in reaping benefits while avoiding liabilities. This research was supported, in part, by a Summer Research grant from the Goizueta Business School, Emory University, discussions at the Human Social, Culture and Behavior Modeling Program meetings of the Office of Naval Research.

Historical Roots of the A Behavioral Theory of the Firm Model at GSIA.

Organization Science
Richard Cyert and James March’s (1963) A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (ABTOF) is one of the most influential works in organization science. An important element of that work was a computational model of a duopoly, which was arguably the first computational model that instantiated organizational constructs within a substantial theoretical framework. We suggest that the academic environment within which this theory and model grew was instrumental in its emergence. Furthermore, an examination of the model itself (by triangulating on the verbal descriptions, the flow charts, and the code) reveals innovative embodiments of organizational attention, organizational learning, organizational memory, routines, metaroutines, aspiration level adjustments, and computational experiments. In this paper, we examine the historical roots of the model—the concepts, culture, and characters at Carnegie Tech and the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA). Although causality is difficult to assess historically, we suggest the significance of a strong research-based, interdisciplinary culture at a time when innovative (and often computational) concepts and theories were emerging within the contexts of computer science, economics, and psychology. A shorter version of this paper won the John F. Mee Award for Management History from the Academy of Management. This project was funded in part by the Carnegie Bosch institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

Situational Uses of Syndromic Surveillance

Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science
We conducted case studies of selected events with actual or potential public health impacts to determine whether and how health departments and hospitals used automatic systems to promptly identify public healthcare threats. We interviewed public health and hospital representatives and applied qualitative analysis methods to identify response themes. So-called ‘‘syndromic’’ surveillance methods were most useful in situations with widespread health effects, such as respiratory illness associated with seasonal influenza, exposures to smoke from wildfires, or potential pathogens in air samples. Typically, these data supplemented information from traditional sources to provide a timelier or fuller mosaic of community health status, and use was shaped by long-standing contacts between health department and hospital staffs. State or local epidemiologists generally preferred syndromic systems they had developed over the CDC BioSense system, citing lesser familiarity with BioSense and less engagement in its development. Instances when BioSense data were most useful to state officials occurred when analyses and reports were provided by CDC staff. Understanding the uses of surveillance information during such events can inform further investments in surveillance capacity in public health emergency preparedness programs. This project was supported by the National Center for Public Health Informatics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the BioSense Utility cooperative agreement.

Design Principles for Crisis Information Systems

International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Management
Since Hurricane Katrina, research has focused on improving disaster management through the use of specially designed crisis information systems (CIS). However, there are few design principles specific to these dynamic environments. Toward that end, we engaged in a 9-month project studying one of the most respected emergency response organizations in the world -- the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Here we report key principles of design that apply to these critical information systems. This work was supported by the University of Notre Dame, Emory University, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation.

The Making of an Expert

Harvard Business Review
Popular lore tells us that genius is born, not made. Scientific research, on the other hand, reveals that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching. We studied data on the behavior of experts gathered by more than 100 scientists. Ordinary practice is not enough: To reach elite levels of performance, you need to constantly push yourself beyond your abilities and comfort level. Such discipline is the key to becoming an expert in all domains, including management and leadership. What consistently distinguished elite surgeons, chess players, writers, athletes, pianists, and other experts was the habit of engaging in "deliberate" practice--a sustained focus on tasks that they couldn't do before. Experts continually analyzed what they did wrong, adjusted their techniques, and worked arduously to correct their errors. Even such traits as charisma can be developed using this technique. For example, the authors describe such an approach applying specific techniques of drama enhanced executives' powers of presence and persuasion. Through deliberate practice, leaders can improve their ability to win over their employees, their peers, or their board of directors. The journey to elite performance is not for the impatient or the faint of heart. For some types of eliteness, it takes at least a decade and requires the guidance of an expert teacher to provide tough, often painful feedback. It also demands would-be experts to develop their "inner coach" and eventually drive their own progress. However, such methods engaged to acquire expertise can (and should be) applied to skill improvement on most any level.

CASA, WASA, and the Dimensions of US

Computers in Human Behavior
We replicate and extend the Computers are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm that repeatedly found evidence that humans treat computers with typical social norms as if they were humans. We performed a between-subjects 2 x 2 factorial experiment to test our hypotheses as well as an exploratory factor analysis to further refine and validate a construct which measures politeness. We retest the CASA paradigm and find that our new hypothesis – Websites are Social Actors (WASA) reduces the CASA effect in contexts where individuals form a social attachment to websites instead of computers. We find evidence that suggests humans can exhibit politeness toward websites and literally (not virtually) treat them as social actors. Finally, we tease out the elements of politeness as a construct and identify the key items in the instrument for data reduction, and initiate efforts towards establishing reliability and construct validity. The results of an exploratory factor analysis are consistent with research in social cognition and suggest that the politeness construct may be tapping similar and fundamental components of how humans engage with others in their social world, signaling the importance of user experience considerations in website design.