Social Norms, Social Change I

Cristina Bicchieri is the S. J. Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research intersects philosophy, game theory, and psychology. Her primary focus is on judgment and decision-making, particularly regarding fairness, trust, and cooperation, and how expectations influence behavior. She also investigates the nature and evolution of social norms, measuring consensus and compliance, and developing strategies for fostering social change through her work with the Penn Social Norms Training and Consulting group. In her recent studies, she has designed behavioral experiments to test hypotheses from her book The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms (2006), revealing that individuals often have conditional preferences for pro-social norms that can be significantly altered by changes in expectations. Prof. Bicchieri's earlier research delved into the epistemic foundations of game theory, exploring how information changes rational choices and outcomes. Her contributions include developing axiomatic models in game theory and creating algorithms for solving games of both perfect and imperfect information, which are particularly relevant for artificial intelligence applications.