OUR TEAM

CRISTINA BICCHIERI, DIRECTOR

The S. J. Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Studies and Comparative Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Cristina Bicchieri she is also director of Penn’s Masters of Behavioral and Decision Sciences; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program and the BeLab. The author of more than 100 articles and 7 books, including Rationality and Coordination, The Logic of Strategy, The Dynamics of Norms, and Knowledge, Belief, and Strategic Interaction, she has been a fellow at Harvard, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, the London School of Economics (Leverhulme Trust), and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Jerusalem.

Her latest books are The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms (2006) and Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms (2016). She is a world authority on social norms, and has consulted with the UNICEF Child Protection Section, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, BBC Media and many other groups on social norms and social change.

Bicchieri has designed, carried out, and published several human-subject experiments and consulted on social norms, trust, fairness and cooperation. She has pioneered techniques for the measurement of social norms, and has shown how the provision of information can change mutual expectations in a manner that induces shifts in social behavior.