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Causal Reasoning, Policy Opportunities and the Emergence of Self-Serving Narratives.

Project description

Shedding light on the use of economic narratives

Narratives play a crucial role in interpreting data, forming expectations, and evaluating policy proposals by establishing cause and effect relationships. The MCSA-funded NARRATIVEss project aims to investigate economic narratives, their interaction with policy proposals, and the manipulation of these narratives by economic actors. It also seeks to provide recommendations for addressing situations where policy disputes can generate polarised views. This interdisciplinary project will combine ideas and methods from economics, sociology, psychology, and computer science. It will conduct behavioural experiments to examine how narratives respond to the cost of available policies for agents, analyse the influence of narratives on political preferences in the latter half of the 20th century, and explore methods for measuring narratives from textual sources.

Objective

Narratives the stories people formulate to make sense of the world contain at their core cause and effect relationships that people use to connect the events they observe. These relationships are crucial for interpreting data, forming expectations, and evaluating policy proposals. This project aims at improving our understanding of the role of economic narratives, their interaction with policy proposals, and how they can be manipulated by economic actors. The ultimate goal of this project is to suggest strategies to follow when faced with contexts in which struggles over policies might generate polarized views of how the world works.

The project is divided into three areas and combines ideas and methods at the intersection between economics, sociology, psychology, and computer science. The first area of research involves behavioral experiments in which I will study how narratives react to the cost of policies available to agents. In particular, I will investigate whether agents tend to adopt narratives that are self-serving, that is, compatible with the policies they find least costly. The second area of research focuses on the role that narratives played in shaping political preference in the second half of the XX century. I will consider labor unions to study the factors behind the emergence in the United States of a narrative highlighting their mischiefs. These results could highlight the magnitude and importance of the consequences generated by those that become prevailing narratives in a society. The last area of research will involve a methodological study on how to measure narratives from text. I will work to extend the available methods with the goal of explicitly capturing causal relationships. This contribution could favor the emergence of new work in the field by other researchers who could easily analyze large corpora of text.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI SIENA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 172 750,08
Address
VIA BANCHI DI SOTTO 55
53100 Siena
Italy

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Region
Centro (IT) Toscana Siena
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

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