I’ve Been Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship!

I got the Fulbright Scholarship for next the year!

This year I decided to apply for the “Fulbright Foundation grant” to conduct a research stay in the United States during the next academic year. And I got into the local news!

My project focuses on analyzing the concept of reasonableness as a social heuristic. But what do we really mean by being reasonable? Many of our everyday and collective moral decisions—such as meat consumption, how we treat certain social groups, or our attention to the environment—revolve around this normative threshold: the reasonable. Yet, despite being such a pervasive standard in our daily lives, we know surprisingly little about how it takes shape in our minds and, more importantly, how it guides our moral behavior.

My Fulbright project addresses precisely this gap. I am investigating whether reasonableness functions as a social heuristic—that is, as a shared mental shortcut we use to make moral decisions quickly and efficiently. In this sense, reasonableness would point neither to perfect or ideal behavior, nor merely to what is common or average, but rather to something “good enough”: demanding enough to avoid moral condemnation, yet flexible enough to be achievable without incurring significant personal, effort-related, or time-related costs.

Recently, we have been exploring the concept of reasonableness through experimental jurisprudence, and we have observed that reasonableness is perceived as more morally permissible and more intuitive (more cognitively accessible) than other normative criteria, which could suggest the presence of such a heuristic. These findings are detailed in this project and were also presented last July in Norwich.

In the United States, specifically at Georgetown Law, I will experimentally test whether people’s actions follow a pattern of reasonableness and whether the most efficient solutions in various behavioral games—both at the group and individual levels—tend to be organize precisely around this standard. I will conduct this research under the guidance of Professor K. Tobia. Professor Tobia is a leading international figure in the field of experimental jurisprudence, a discipline that has integrated empirical methods to study concepts with long-standing philosophical and legal traditions –such as reasonableness.

I must admit I am especially excited to carry out this research with such leading and influential figures in the field. In addition, I am honored by the prospect of joining the vibrant community of the Fulbright Foundation.