Professor Sarah Harvey has been recognised with the Academy of Management’s 2026 Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior Award for research exploring how creators of artificial intelligence technologies grapple with the moral consequences of their ideas.
The award, sponsored by Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, honours the paper judged to have made the most significant contribution to advancing the field of organisational behaviour.
Professor Harvey received the award alongside co-authors Lydia P. Hagtvedt (Akamai Technologies), Henrik Hagtvedt (Boston College), and Ozumcan Demir-Caliskan (Imperial College London) for their paper, “Bright and dark imagining: How creators navigate moral consequences of developing ideas for artificial intelligence,” published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2025. Ozumcan Demir-Caliskan is also a former UCL School of Management PhD student.
The study examined how people developing AI technologies think about the potential downstream impacts of their innovations. While previous research has largely focused either on the benefits of creativity or on negative behaviours associated with the creative process, the paper shifts attention to how creators consider the possibility that their ideas could ultimately cause harm.
Through a qualitative study of AI creators, the researchers found that unexpected developments during creative work prompt individuals to imagine the future consequences of their ideas. These reflections then influence both how they engage with ethical concerns and how they develop new technologies.
The research identified two distinct approaches. The first, which the authors call “bright imagining”, involves separating moral concerns from the creative process itself, allowing ideas to be developed with relatively few constraints while relying on formal safeguards to address ethical issues later. The second, “dark imagining”, integrates moral concerns directly into idea development, transforming ethical constraints into creative forces that shape the nature of the ideas being created.
In announcing the award, the committee praised the study’s originality and importance:
“This paper offers a fresh and important contribution by examining how creators engage with the moral consequences of their ideas during the creative process. The distinction between ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ imagining is theoretically generative, highly relevant in the context of AI, and opens new avenues for research on creativity and ethics.”
The paper Bright and dark imagining: How creators navigate moral consequences of developing ideas for artificial intelligence was authored by Hagtvedt, L. P., Harvey, S., Demir-Caliskan, O., & Hagtvedt, H.
