Riccardo Viale

Research

Riccardo Viale has developed the implications of behavioral sciences and embodied cognition in economic and social sciences and in the epistemology and the theory of rationality.

Main research interests

Nudging and Boosting; Behavioral Public Administration and Policy; Behavioral Economics and Finance; Embodied Cognition; Social Neurocognition; Bounded Rationality; Enactive Problem Solving; Cognitive Models of Reasoning and Decision Making; Cognitive Theory of Science and Technology; Cognitive Economics; Cognitive Anthropology; Epistemology of Social Science; Methodology of social sciences;  Social Epistemology and Science and Technology Policy; Innovation and Research Policy; Entrepreneurial Behaviour; Behavioral Approach Against Disinformation; Behavioral and Socio-Economic Impact of Artificial Intelligence.

Rationality

Through the collaboration with Dan Osherson, a series of empirical deviations from inductive rationality have been analysed. The presence of the conjunction fallacy was confirmed even after taking particular precautions in the use of the terms. The falalcy of the conjunction manifested itself both in the betting conditions and in those of probabilistic instructions1.

It has been studied to what extent the child can be considered a “little scientist”. For this to be possible she must be able to make rational inductive inferences. It has been shown experimentally that there is cultural and geographical variability in children’s treatment of the inductive support that derives from the difference in empirical evidence in support of a hypothesis2 3.

Finally, it was confirmed that most speakers experience little clarity on the application of predicates such as tall and red to liminal cases. A psychologized version of the “vagueness as ignorance” theory was advanced and defended4.

An in-depth study of the rationality of the scientific method was carried out in the 80s and 90s with the collaboration of William Newton Smith. The concept of cognitive rationality of science was developed and in particular the falsificationist deductive behavior was experimentally analyzed, finding evidence in support of the confirmatory tendency dominant in scientific activity and explained with the theory of mental models5.

The cognitive approach to scientific rationality is connected to the concept of bounded rationality introduced by Herbert Simon. This concept linked to traditional cognitivism is analyzed in light of the emerging hypotheses of “embodied cognition”.

The concept of “embodied bounded rationality”6 is elaborated and developed with the collaboration of, among others, Shaun Gallagher and Vittorio Gallese.

Methodological Cognitivism and Embodied Individualism

Methodological Cognitivism (MC)was introduced by Viale in the 80’s as an evolution of methodological individualism (IM). Raymond Boudon was the main interlocutor in this development. 

MC appears to neutralise some of the epistemological and methodological difficulties of MI and is more firmly rooted in the fabric of scientific knowledge, that is cognitive sciences which is now more widely accredited in the study of human society. MC has three main philosophical components7 8:

  1. The causal explanatory model
  2. The mind-body identity theory 
  3. The cognitive models of social action

The term Methodological Cognitivism was introduced in the late 90s when cognitivism was dominated by the information processing psychology approach. The model of the mind was of the Cartesian type, and the analogy was that of the digital Turing machine.

The MC programme was however open to incorporate within it the developments of neurocognitive sciences and embodied cognition. A dimension of wide embodied cognition of action incorporates both the causal role of the body and the causal variables of the extended, embedded and enactive dimension of individual action.

Ultimately, it is an Embodied Individualism9 that structurally includes the environmental and social dimension in individual action. The concept of social affordances and the individual enaction towards them demonstrates how there is a horizontal relationship and recursive interaction between individual action and the social environment10. The embedded dimension of the action, in the sense of the situational context that shapes it, is another concept that expresses the founding social dimension of the action.

Finally, the extended dimension of cognition which is not limited only to what is contained in the individual’s skull, but is present in all mnemonic supports, external computing devices and symbolic tools of an artificial but also social human type.

Enactive Problem Solving

Viale aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making11. This alternative path was born from the collaboration first with Herbert Simon and subsequently with Shaun Gallagher and Vittorio Gallese.

This alternative way recovers Newell and Simon’s tradition of problem solving and inserts it into the new research program of embodied cognition. Herbert Simon emphasizes the importance of problem solving and differentiates it from decision making, which he considers a phase downstream of the former. Moreover according to Simon the centre of gravity of the rationality of the action lies in the ability to adapt. And the centre of gravity of adaptation is not so much in the internal environment of the actor as in the pragmatic external environment. 

The behaviour adapts to external purposes and reveals those characteristics of the system that limit its adaptation. According to Simon12, in fact, environmental feedbacks are the most effective in modelling human actions in solving a problem. The same selectivity in the solution of a problem is based on the recursive feedback of information from the environment. Infact problem space is about the possible situations to be searched in order to find that situation which corresponds to the solution.

Using the language of the embodied cognition problem space is about the possible solutions that are enacted by the environmental affordances. The correspondence between action and solution of a problem conceptually bypasses the analytic phase of the decision and limits the role of symbolic representation. 

In solving any problem, the search for the solution corresponds to acting in the sense of wide and strong embodied cognition, that is, to a recursive feedback process leading up to the final action. From this point of view, the new term enactive problem solving summarizes this fusion between the two moments and could well represent the phenomenon.

Lastly the enactive problem solving seems to be able to explain also the mechanisms underlying the adaptive heuristics of rational ecology. Its adaptive function seems effective both in practical and motor tasks as well as in abstract and symbolic ones13.

Cognitive Economics

The term was introduced in a 1997 volume edited by Viale14 which collected the proceedings of the conference organized in 1995, with the same title, at the L.Bocconi University of Milan.

To sum up: Cognitive economics is the study of the adaptive interaction of one or more embodied cognitive agents in a market or hierarchic organization.

Here are the main features of cognitive economics:

Descriptive aim: it has a realist and not a strumentalist as-if aim to represent the economic phenomena. The knowledge should be supplied by experiments that are not artifacts but ecologically sound.

Normative aim: it evaluates the economic action according to an adaptive ecological approach of bounded rationality.

Theory of social agent: from methodological point of view it will follow an approach characterized by embodied individualism, that is social and economic phenomena are explained causally by the interaction of embodied cognitive actors. 

Theory of cognition: the cognitive dimension is embodied in a wide meaning. The action relies on visceral, motor, sensorial and emotional causes beyond the Central Nervous System role; action is based on enactive heuristic problem solving, that is in a process of problem solving characterized by pragmatic feedback loops with the environment; cognition is extended and distributed in the environment; the meaning of action relies on the situational context, that is cognition is embedded.

Features of environment: the environment is characterized mainly by uncertainty, complexity, non linearity and instability.

Market: it is characterized by the adaptive interaction of embodied agents according extended cognitive tools (e.g. the prices), embedded in a situational context (e.g. the symbolic value of the goods), enacting by a problem solving constrained by institutional norms (e.g. the norm to protect the competition or to improve the transparency)

Hierarchic organization: firms and economic organizations are characterized by the adaptive interactions of embodied agents using extended cognitive tools (e.g. the organizational manuals endowed with routines), embedded in a situational context (e.g. the organizational culture), enacting by problem solving constrained by institutional norms (e.g. the hierarchy of decision making or the norms to evaluate the performance and the carreer) and by competitive and selective pressure from the external environment.

Cognitive economics, developed in collaboration withMassimo Egidi, differs from behavioral economics above all in its descriptive and normative objectives and in its theory of cognition and action.

Both disciplines derive, however, from the cognitive revolution in economics and social sciences begun centuries earlier by John Stuart Mill with the introduction of psychologism into the methodology of social sciences and subsequently continued by authors such as Leon J. Goldstein15 and George Homans16, but above all by Herbert Simon17 starting from 1947 onwards and subsequently in the field of behavioral economics with Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler, Vernon Smith, Robert Shiller and so on.

At the same time, in a different field of study on decision making and bounded rationality, the reference goes to Gerd Gigerenzer, Robin Hogarth, Richard Selten, Peter Todd, Laura Martignon, Ulrich Hoffrage, Ralph Hertwig and so on.

This approach intersects with various contributions from economics that criticize the model of neoclassical economics such as the authors of the institutionalist approach such as Douglas North, Oliver Williamson, Elinor Ostrom and the supporters of the evolutionary approach such as Richard Nelson, Sidney Winter and Giovanni Dosi and so on.

In the purely economic context, the forerunners can be traced back in various ways to Adam Smith, John Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, Frederik Von Hayek, Kenneth Arrow and others.

Behavioral Public Administration and Organizational Behavioral Audit

Behavioral public administration is a term introduced by Viale, in 200918. It summarizes a line of research that has several objectives: the analyis of the public decision-maker’s errors and bias; how to neutralize sub-optimal behaviors in public organizational problem solving; how to stimulate innovation and organizational learning; the role of emotions in organizational identity and crowd-in; how to foster organizational citizenship well-being and behaviors; moral reasoning and public organizational ethics; the improvement of individual and organizational performance in public policy making and implementation18 20.

As Lars Tummers writes20, “behavioral public administration can be broadly described as an interdisciplinary research field that studies public administration topics by connecting insights from public administration with psychology and the wider behavioral sciences”. 

The behavioral audit of the organization has recently been promoted by Viale, in the private and public sector, to assess, monitor and quantify behavioral phenomena within an organization that can strengthen or not strengthen organizational performance: biases, distortions and errors in the process decision-making; organizational citizenship behavior in a cooperative, altruistic and organizational identity sense; culture of error and acceptance of critical thinking; openness to innovation and change22.

Behavioral audit includes the study of the behavioral phenomena inside an organization: decision making biases; organizational citizenship behavior; culture of error; openness to innovation and change.

Behavioral Public Policy and Bounded Rational Adaptive Nudge (BRAN)

Another behavioral approach by Viale is the critique to nudge theory20 22 25. It has been noted that the proposal contained in the volume by Thaler and Sunstein26 and in subsequent articles, also identified as libertarian paternalism, constitutes an absolutely positive innovation in the field of public policy, but it is accompanied by negative aspects that must be considered and overcome.

In particular, it has been pointed out that nudges can be divided into at least two categories on the basis of the libertarian criterion of autonomy and conscious choice of the citizen: System 2 or deliberation-promoting nudges that promote the capacity for conscious decision-making and help to avoid errors and bias; System 1 nudges or automaticity-promoting nudges that, on the contrary, build on some automatic propensities of the so-called S1 to push the citizen to make choices for their supposed well-being, as decided by the policymaker in charge.

Viale pointed out20 22 that the terminological reference to System 1 and System 2 has a didactic reason and a metaphorical function and does not entail adherence to the theory of mental dualism, for which there is no empirical or theoretical justification. Also that the concept of nudging proposed by T&S presupposes the acceptance of the descriptive and normative foundations of behavioral economics and Kahneman & Teversky’s Heuristics and Biases program.

In this regard, some weaknesses have been highlighted from an empirical and descriptive point of view concerning the main assumptions of behavioral economics (such as prospect theory) and it has been noted that its rules of formal rationality are valid only in situations of risk and not in those that represent a large part of our daily and public life, characterized by uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity and complexity. This work was born from the collaboration with Denis Hilton and Gerd Gigerenzer.

In order to characterize nudging’s positive and negative aspects, especially from the point of view of safeguarding the autonomy and choice of the citizen, Viale developed two categories of nudges, the good and the bad ones. Using a mash-up of the words nudge and good and nudge and evil respectively, we could introduce two neologisms, Nudgood and Nudgevil, to characterize these two evaluation dimensions22.

One area where behavioral study was concentrated was innovation policy, realized in collaboration with Henry Etzkowitz, and in particular the development of the triple helix model of interaction between academia, business and government to promote innovation and new ventures30. An interesting study has been developed about the analysis of the different cognitive styles between academic researchers and industrial researchers (8) and on the cognitive dimension of tacit knowledge in the economic and technological fields31.

The heuristic decision making represent, at a prescriptive level, effective adaptive success tools in situations of uncertainty, complexity and generally with limited resources of time and analytical skills. According to Viale (19, 20) it is possible to incorporate these decision-making tools in nudges that help citizens make adaptive choices in uncertain and complex situations.

They are Bounded Rational Adaptive Nudges (BRAN) that make available to citizens simple and frugal ways to choose that are useful in specific uncertain environments and that in this way strengthen their autonomous capacity for decision making and success in the performance of a task. There is a set of one-reason-based heuristicsthat perfectly represent BRAN – including among others the satisficing, lexicographic, and elimination by aspect heuristics – that can become useful decision-making tools for the citizen when choosing in situations of complexity and uncertainty.

Another useful tool is the generation of Fast and Frugal Trees (FFTs). In order to facilitate the choice of public services like a school, a hospital, a sports club in a big city, the local administration could create apps that incorporate the use of the three heuristics or the FFTs. This work was born from the collaboration with Gerd Gigerenzer and Laura Martignon.

Behavioral City

In 2022 Viale introduces the concept of behavioral city30. It represents the convergence between behavioral urbanism and behavioral public policies at the city level. The ways in which the spaces, infrastructures and buildings of a city are planned and built must consider the behavioral impact on the lives of citizens and how they interact psychologically with these physical structures.

Likewise, city public policies, such as mobility, assistance, health, free time, sport, research, start-ups, must be calibrated to the citizen’s behavioral reaction in order to achieve individual public well-being objectives. Only if the behavioral design of urban planning and housing policies intersects with that of public services and welfare is it possible to guarantee that the objectives of policy makers can be achieved.

  1. Sides, A., Osherson, D., Bonini, N. et al. (2002) On the reality of the conjunction fallacy. Memory & Cognition 30, 191–198. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195280 ↩︎
  2. Viale, R. & Osherson, D. (2006). Cognitive development, culture, and inductive judgment. In Riccardo Viale, D. Andler & Lawrence A. Hirschfeld (eds.), Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference. Lawerence Erlbaum. ↩︎
  3. Viale, R. & Osherson, D. (2000). The Diversity Principle and the Little Scientist Hypothesis. Foundations of Science 5 (2):239-253. ↩︎
  4. Nicolao Bonini, N., Osherson, D., Viale, R. and Williamson, T. (1999) On the Psychology of Vague Predicates, Memory & Language Volume 14, Issue 4 Pages: 377-469. ↩︎
  5. Viale, R. (1992). Metodo e società nella scienza. Milano: Franco Angeli. ↩︎
  6. S.Gallagher, S., Viale, R. and Gallese, V.(eds., 2023). Embodied Bounded Rationality. Lausanne: Frontiers. ↩︎
  7. 2013 Methodological Cognitivism, Vol. 2 Cognition, Science, and Innovation, Springer. ↩︎
  8. 2012 Methodological Cognitivism, Vol 1 Mind, Rationality and Society, Springer. ↩︎
  9. Viale, R. (2023) “Embodied Individualism” in N. Bulle and F. Di Iorio (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. London: Palgrave McMillan. ↩︎
  10. Viale, R. “Enactive Problem Solving: An Alternative To The Limits Of Decision Making” in G.Gigerenzer, R. Viale and S. Mousavi (eds.). Companion to Herbert Simon. Cheltenham: Elgar (2023). ↩︎
  11. Viale. R, Gallagher, S., and Gallese V. (2023). Bounded Rationality, Enactive Problem Solving and The Neuroscience of Social Interaction, Frontiers in Psychology. 14:1152866. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1152866 (2023). ↩︎
  12. Simon, H. (1981). The Sciences of Artificial. Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press. ↩︎
  13. 2021 Handbook of Bounded Rationality, London: Routledge. ↩︎
  14. Viale, R. (a cura di, 1997) Cognitive Economics, Lascomes Series, 1 Torino: La Rosa Editrice. ↩︎
  15. Goldstein, L. J. (1974). Social sciences, ontology, and explanation: Some further reflections. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 4(3), 359–368. ↩︎
  16. Homans, G. C. (1970). The relevance of psychology to the explanation of social phenomena. In R. Borger & F. Cioffi (Eds.), Explanation in the behavioural sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
  17. H. Simon, M. Egidi, R. Viale and R. Marris (1992; reprinted in 2008) Economics, Bounded Rationality and the Cognitive Revolution, Brookfield: Edward Elgar. ↩︎
  18. Viale, R. (2009) Introduzione: Verso una “Behavioral Public Administration”. Sistemi Intelligenti, 1, 3-12. ↩︎
  19. Viale, R. (2009) Introduzione: Verso una “Behavioral Public Administration”. Sistemi Intelligenti, 1, 3-12. ↩︎
  20. Tummers, L. “Behavioral Public Administration” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019). ↩︎
  21. Tummers, L. “Behavioral Public Administration” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019). ↩︎
  22. Viale, R. (2022). Nudging. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. ↩︎
  23. Tummers, L. “Behavioral Public Administration” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019). ↩︎
  24. Viale, R. (2022). Nudging. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. ↩︎
  25. Viale, R. (2018). Oltre il Nudge. Bologna: Il Mulino. ↩︎
  26. Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster (2008). ↩︎
  27. Tummers, L. “Behavioral Public Administration” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019). ↩︎
  28. Viale, R. (2022). Nudging. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. ↩︎
  29. Viale, R. (2022). Nudging. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. ↩︎
  30. Etzkowitz, H., & Viale, R. (2010). Polyvalent Knowledge and the Entrepreneurial University: A Third Academic Revolution? Critical Sociology, 36(4), 595–609. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920510365921 ↩︎
  31. Balconi, M., Pozzali, A., and Viale, R. (2007) “The Codification Debate Revisited: A Conceptual Framework to Analyze the Role of Tacit Knowledge in Economics” Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 16, Issue 5, pp. 823-849. ↩︎
  32. Etzkowitz, H., & Viale, R. (2010). Polyvalent Knowledge and the Entrepreneurial University: A Third Academic Revolution? Critical Sociology, 36(4), 595–609. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920510365921 ↩︎