Professor Dr Cristina Bicchieri

Research Priorities: Social norms, Social epistemology, Social learning, Behavioral decision science, Epistemic game theory
Cristina Bicchieri is an Italian-America philosopher. Her main research, both theoretical and applied, involves the nature and dynamics of social norms. For Bicchieri, it is crucial not only to understand how norms emerge or can be changed, but also the mechanisms of social learning that underlie such processes. Applications to public policy cover both public health issues such as behavioral changes induced by pandemics as well as changes needed with respect to environmental challenges such as global warming.
Her primary research focus is on judgment and decision making with special interest in decisions about fairness, trust, and cooperation, and how expectations affect behavior. A second research focus examines the evolution of social norms, especially norms of fairness and cooperation. A third, earlier research focus has been the epistemic foundations of game theory and how changes in information affects rational choices and solutions.
In her most recent work, Bicchieri has designed behavioral experiments aimed at testing several hypotheses based on the theory of social norms. The experimental results show that most subjects have a conditional preference for following pro-social norms. Manipulating their expectations causes major behavioral changes (i.e., from fair to unfair choices, from cooperation to defection, etc.). One of the conclusions can be drawn is that there are no such things as stable dispositions or unconditional preferences (to be fair, reciprocate, cooperate, and so on). Another is that policymakers who want to induce pro-social behavior have to work on changing people's expectations about how other people behave in similar situations. These results have major consequences for understanding of moral behavior and the construction of better normative theories, grounded on what people can in fact do.
The nature and dynamics of social norms studies how norms may emerge and become stable, why an established norm may suddenly be abandoned, how is it possible that inefficient or unpopular norms survive, and what motivates people to obey norms. In order to answer some of these questions, Bicchieri has combined evolutionary and game-theoretic tools with models of decision making drawn from cognitive and social psychology. For example, Bicchieri uses her theory of context-dependent preferences to build more realistic evolutionary models of the emergence of pro-social norms of fairness and reciprocity.