I am a senior researcher at Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden. I am also a senior researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy in Rome, where I am the coordinator of the Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation (LABSS).
My research focuses on the emergence, enforcement, change and decay of social norms and their effects on cooperation and conflicts. My research topics include cooperation, altruism, honesty, as well as bad norms and misinformation. I use theoretical and computational models, combined with on-line and laboratory experiments, surveys and big data to answer these and related questions about social norms. Although primarily fundamental, my research aims also at informing policy.
I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 2007. I was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2010-2011) and post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (2012-2017). My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such Nature Communications, Social Forces, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Synthese, Complexity, and Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. On the topic of social norms, I have published the book Minding Norms for Oxford University Press.
I am the PI of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Academy project Norm Change (2017-2022), an interdisciplinary project to investigate how harmful social norms can be changed.
