Cristina Bicchieri, Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, and Professor of Legal Studies. Courtesy of Cristina Bicchieri.
Understanding how to change bad behaviors and make better decisions is an asset in areas including social and public policy, law, education, business, and medicine. Penn Arts and Sciences’ new Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences (MBDS) was created to give its students the tools to address a variety of real-life problems, by knowing how individuals and groups make
decisions and how to affect those decisions for the better. The program’s director, Cristina Bicchieri, Sacha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Department of Philosophy, has consulted for UNICEF and the World Bank and is the author of Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms.
“The MBDS was created by Cristina Bicchieri based on demand both from undergraduates at Penn and other universities and from working professionals,” says Nora Lewis, Vice Dean for Professional and Liberal Education. “It’s different from many programs because it takes a cross-disciplinary arts and sciences approach to analyzing and understanding human behavior, and it allows students to select a concentration from a wide range of fields offered at Penn.”
