Noteworthy News

• In a recent interview with the Wharton Business Daily, Cristina Bicchieri, Penn Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, joins Wharton Business Daily host Dan Loney to discuss the new norms of mask wearing on this episode of SiriusXM radio show.

• In another blog interview, Center Director, Cristina Bicchieri, shares insightful tips for anti-corruption practitioners that are aiming to change social norms. Dhaval Kothari, the Senior Associate at the Corruption, Justice and Legitimacy Program, recently spoke to Cristina Bicchieri to address the importance and possible negative consequences of not integrating social norms correctly into programming.

• Neuroscientist and Center Member, Joseph Kable, was recently featured in Penn Today article, "What happens in the brain when we imagine the future?" where he discusses recent research that finds two sub-networks are at work in the brain, one focused on creating the new event, another on evaluating whether that event is positive or negative. 

• Philly announces vaccine sweepstakes and a regret lottery to encourage more people in the city to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Alison Buttenheim, Center member and an Associate Professor of Nursing and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania is part of the scientific team behind the vaccine lottery. The idea of a regret lottery further draws on research, including work from behavioral scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, Katy Milkman who recently also gave a NoBeC talk at our Center. 

• This recent interview features Center Members, Barbara Mellers and Phil Tetlock, a husband-and-wife team of scientists who discuss their journey of becoming giants in the field of forecasting by creating and overseeing the Good Judgment Project -  a massive and lengthy academic inquiry into how to train predictors and improve their predictions. 

• In this episode of the Questioning Behavior Podcast, Sarah Bowen and Merle van dan Akker talk to Cristina Bicchieri, Founding Director, Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics, about her work in behavioral science, applying behavioral science to changing behaviors through the application of social norms, all over the world. 

• Guy Grossman, a Center Member and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania is now serving as scientific advisor for IPA’s newest research initiative, in partnership with the Program to End Modern Slavery (PEMS) at the U.S. Department of State, the Human Trafficking Research Initiative.

• Natalie Gold, affiliated Center Member and the Deputy Head of Behavioral Insights and Lead Behavioral Scientist at Public Health England is going to be Principal Investigator on the ESRC's Behavioral Science Scoping Exercise, to help inform their future investment in this area.
 
• William Berger, a Center Member and a Ph.D Fellow in the Philosophy, Politics & Economics Program at the University of Pennsylvania will be joining the University of Arizona’s Department of Political Economy and Moral Science as an Assistant Professor in the fall.

 

In our new NoBeC talk series, we most recently featured Stefano Fiorin (Bocconi University) on 3rd June 2021, with his talk, "From Extreme to Mainstream: The Erosion of Social Norms".

As a quick update regarding upcoming NoBeC Talks, our next talk this Thursday will feature John Beshears (Harvard Business School) with his talk "Nudging: Progress to Date and Future Directions".

For more information about the talk series and the full schedule, please visit our website.

Event Brief

• Cristina Bicchieri, Center Founding Director gave a Keynote Lecture on June 18th, 2021 at the 2021 Summer Conference of the Centre for Collective Action Research (CeCAR) at the University of Gothenburg. The Keynote focused on measuring norms, with examples from applied work. The keynote was followed by shorter presentations, by CeCAR-researchers, representing the breadth and depth of the research within the center. A recording of the keynote will be circulated in our next newsletter once it becomes available.

• Philosopher Cristina Bicchieri discusses how the intentionality of investors or trustees’ actions affects third party compensation and punishment interventions after a trust game in the seventh talk entitled, "[Un]Truths: Trust in an Age of Disinformation" at the PERITIA lectures series.

• On June 11th, Center Member and BIT's North America MD, Michael Hallsworth, spoke at NudgeStock 2021 about BIT’s manifesto for the next decade of behavioral science. NudgeStock is the can't-miss annual festival curated by Ogilvy Consulting, featuring a wonderfully eclectic mix of talks and case studies from some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the worlds of behavioral science, marketing and creativity. Watch the full recording of the NudgeStock 2021 event here.

• On June 4, Center Member and Assistant Professor of Psychology at UPenn, Sudeep Bhatia conducted an online workshop on Text Analysis for Behavioral Science, at the Alan Turing Institute, UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.

Publication Pulse

• Enrique Fatas, a Center Member, Behavioral scientist & Distinguished Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, has a new publication on heterogeneous abilities in inter-group contests which can be read here.

• Abraham Aldama Navarrete, a Center Member and a postdoctoral fellow University of Pennsylvania has a new paper, A Theory of Social Programs, Legitimacy and Citizen Cooperation with the State, that just got accepted at the Journal of Peace Research. 

• Ammar Plumber, a Research Specialist at the Center, just published his undergraduate honors thesis, "Earnings Premia of Undergraduate Single and Double Majors" in the Columbia Economic Review.

• Giuseppe Danese, a Center Member and a Fellow in the Philosophy, Politics & Economics Program at the University of Pennsylvania published the paper, "One person's trash is another person's treasure: In search of an efficient property regime for waste in the Global South", where he studies the efficiency of different property regimes for waste in the Global South.

• Ryan Muldoon, a Center Member and Associate Professor of Philosophy at University at Buffalo has co-edited the first book, The Open Society and Its Complexities in @OUPPhilosophy's new PPE Series. The book is now available for pre-orders.

• Jana Freundt, a Center member and a behavioral scientist at the University of Fribourg recently published a paper studying how risk impacts the voluntary provision of public goods. The study provides experimental evidence on how risks in different dimensions of the return from a public good impact investments decision.

•  Hugo Mercier, a Center member and an Evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research has published a new paper entitled, Truth-making institutions: From divination, ordeals and oaths to judicial torture and rules of evidence, in the latest issue of the journal, Evolution and Human Behavior.

• Rinad Beidas, a Center Member and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania who wrote an opinion piece for JAMA Psychiatry where she argues that concepts from behavioral economics (BE) must be brought to implementation science to accelerate the reach and impact of psychiatric treatments.

• Guy Grossman who is also the co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative, recently published another paper, "Who Registers? Village Networks, Household Dynamics, and Voter Registration in Rural Uganda", that has been accepted for publication at the Comparative Political Studies Journal. 

• Guy Grossman has also published an op-ed in the Washington Post, entitled, "An Islamist party is part of Israel’s new coalition government. How did that happen?", where he explains how one of the more surprising outcomes of the Israeli election is that an Islamist party outfoxed Netanyahu to become key to building the coalition that beat him. 

• Rafael Ventura, a Center Member & MindCORE-sponsored postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, has a new preprint on the evolution of teaching where he and his co-author show that there can be an opportunity cost to teaching. As a result, teachers run into an explain-exploit dilemma akin to the exploit-explore tradeoff for learners.

• Gareth Roberts, a Center Member and Assistant professor in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania has a new preprint, Drift as a driver of language change: An artificial language experiment, with Rafael Ventura and another co-author. Their results add to a growing body of evidence that drift may be a major driver of language change.