Professor Cristina Bicchieri

Cristina Bicchieri is the S. J. Patterson Harvie Chair of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, and Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She founded and directs the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics. Bicchieri is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the Germany Academy of Science. She is Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge University.

Bicchieri has worked with UNICEF, the Gates and Templeton foundations, the World Bank, USAID, DFID and many other public and private organizations. Collective behavior change and social norm change are her major consulting and training area.

Most of her center’s consulting work consists in developing specific measures, advising on effective interventions, and monitoring sustainability. She has developed a Penn-UNICEF Coursera on Social Norms/Social Change, and her most recent book, Norms in the Wild: how to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms (Oxford University Press, 2016) reflects on her experiences from field work on sanitation, corruption, and the role of trendsetters in collective behavior change. She holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and a Master and BA from the University of Milano.

She was knighted Cavaliere Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2007 and in 2020, she was elected to the Germany National Academy of Science, Leopoldina. In 2021, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.