Biography

Sergio Lo Iacono received his PhD in Sociology at the University of Essex under the ESRC +3 Advanced Quantitative Methods scheme, and holds a Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
His main research interests concern trust, social cohesion, collective action dilemmas, and social networks. In his thesis, he investigated the current institution-centred and society-centred explanations of trust, empirically assessing their core arguments. In particular, he focused on the impact of dense networks’ reputation systems on pro-social attitudes, exploring the validity of the “Spillover” effect.
During his time at the University of Essex, Sergio worked as a Survey Researcher for the Bright Futures Project (lead by Prof. Yasemin Soysal and funded by the ESRC, the German Research Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation) and as a Research Officer for the Ecology of Inequality Project (lead by Dr. Neli Demireva and funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant). In addition, he taught several methodological classes at the undergraduate level.
As a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI, Sergio will carry on his research agenda and further investigate if and how community social embeddedness fosters cooperative and trusting behaviours towards strangers, using both observational and experimental data.