PhD- story - Daria Morozova

HEC Paris is a fostering and welcoming environment which inspires you to achieve your scholarly goals. As daring as your idea might be, you will be able to find advice on how to develop and enhance it. Along with being a perfect place to learn, HEC Paris has all the advantages any student might wish for: its great reputation, community, and location.

The intellectual freedom you can enjoy is one of the greatest things about the Program. Learning from the leading management scholars and from fellow PhD students, you are encouraged to pursue challenging intellectual goals and embark on an exciting research journey, and the multiplicity of experiences that the program provides you with (like courses, research seminars, conferences, even informal conversations over a coffee) are all an inspiration.

In my research, I focus on the psychological mechanisms that underlie human interaction with artificial agents (these are, for example, artificial intelligence-run applications and robots). I find it very interesting because these interactions expand the boundaries of what collaboration is and what being human means.

My work is mostly experimental. I investigate how creativity is impacted by collaboration to an artificial agent and find that workers’ effort might depend on what he or she thinks about AI, what it can or cannot do, and that it is possible that AI can be demotivating for creative work. I also find that workers might be threatened by AI when it is capable of creative work. My research thus has important implications for theory and practice: Why could workers feel threatened by a non-human agent? How do we organize work with AI such that it truly augments humans?

Read more about Daria's research here. 

My advice for future candidates

Being a PhD student at HEC Paris means having the luxury to learn from scholars at the frontiers of managerial science, both within and outside the school. This also entails the freedom to explore the field and – maybe even more importantly – yourself and to grow. That is why my advice to prospective students would be to be both introspective and open-minded: think and reflect carefully on what you’d like to do, but also allow yourself to be surprised and carried away from the things you are used to, things you think you know, and, of course, remember to enjoy yourself in the meantime.