Professor Diego Gambetta FBA

Diego Gambetta is Carlo Alberto Chair at the Fondazione Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin, Italy and an Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.

He received his PhD in social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge (1983), and was Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991. He moved to Oxford in 1992, first as a Lecturer in Sociology at St. Anne’s College, then in 1995, as a Reader in Sociology and Fellow of All Souls College, and finally, in 2003, as an Official Fellow of Nuffield College. In 2012, while on leave from Nuffield, he took up a Chair of Social Theory at the European University Institute in Florence where he remained until he moved to Turin in 2019. He has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, EHT Zurich, Science Po and Collège de France in Paris, and Stanford University. Gambetta has researched challenging topics such as the Sicilian mafia and what motivates violent extremists, including suicide attackers. His longer lasting interest, which still occupies him today has been the study of trust and trustworthiness, of which he was one of the pioneers. His favourite achievement in social theory, which he realised with the late Michael Bacharach, has been demonstrating how the truster’s dilemma of whom to trust can be solved by signalling theory.