Seminar: Dynamics of social norms under collective risk

Global challenges like the climate crisis and pandemic outbreaks require collective responses that quickly adapt to changing circumstances. Social norms are potential solutions, but only if they are capable of adapting themselves. Despite a large literature showing the potential of social norms to promote cooperation in collective action problems, such as energy conservation, vaccine uptake or tax compliance, less is known about how social norms themselves are affected by the changing context, potentially compromising their effectiveness in solving dilemmas.

In this talk, Giulia will discuss the results of three recent studies, a long-term experiment, a cross-country study, and a long term survey measuring social norms, how they change over time and their effect in promoting cooperation under risk. Taken together results from these studies show that it is not obvious that norms are effective solutions to deal with (changing) collective risk, since the norms themselves are affected by risk as well. If we want to leverage social norms to promote long-lasting cooperation, we need a better understanding of the feedback cycle between norms, risk, and behavior.

Giulia Andrighetto is Research Director at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy in Rome, where she is the coordinator of the Laboratory of Agent Based Social Simulation (LABSS). She is also Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linkoping University and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, Sweden.

Her research focuses on the emergence, enforcement, change and decay of social norms and their effects on cooperation and conflicts. Research topics include cooperation, altruism, honesty, as well as bad norms and misinformation. She uses theoretical and computational models, combined with on-line and laboratory experiments, surveys and big data to answer these and related questions about social norms.

Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Communications, PNAS Nexus, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. On the topic of social norms, she has published the book Minding Norms for Oxford University Press. Giulia has been the Principal Investigator of several projects, receiving funding from the European Commission, the Italian Research Council, the Swedish Research Council and the Wallenberg Foundation. She is now the PI of the Norms@Risk project from the Italian Science Fund of the Ministry of University and Research to study social norms and cooperation in situations of collective risk (2024-2029).

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Meeting number: 2741 970 4685

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