Project description
Understanding the virality of economic narratives
Narratives play a critical role in shaping expectations and influencing economic decisions. Considering this fact, the ERC-funded VIRAL project aims to uncover the mechanisms driving the spread and impact of economic narratives through large-scale experiments. Specifically, it will analyse qualitative data from speech recordings of economic narratives alongside quantitative data on beliefs and behaviours. Focusing on the labour market, it will explore which narratives about economic phenomena are most likely to go viral, the characteristics that predict their spread, and how they evolve during transmission. Additionally, VIRAL will examine how the desire to entertain shapes these narratives. By integrating administrative data on economic behaviours, it sheds light on the interplay between narratives and economic decision-making.
Objective
This proposal seeks to study economic narratives. Narratives may both shape expectation formation and influence economic decisions. Using large-scale experiments, this proposal seeks to better understand the drivers of the virality of narratives as well as the mechanisms underlying their persuasive effects. A key feature of this proposal is the combination of qualitative data on economic narratives, as measured in speech recordings, with quantitative data on beliefs and economic behaviors. In Part 1, I seek to study the production and transmission of narratives. In Part 1a, I plan to study which types of narratives about economic phenomena tend to get retold and thereby go viral. The experiments will examine which features of narratives are predictive of their virality and how narratives mutate through the transmission process. In Part 1b, I plan to study how incentives to entertain shape people’s narratives and how the resulting distortions affect downstream belief formation. Part 2 aims to combine administrative data on high-stakes economic behaviors with economic narratives, as measured with speech recordings. I aim to measure narratives about the labor market effects of Artificial intelligence in large representative samples as well as among journalists, politicians and labor market experts. I then plan to relate narratives to important labor market behaviors and educational choices and to examine their origins. Finally, Part 3 proposes to study the mechanisms behind the persuasiveness of narratives. Our experiments will allow us to cleanly identify how narratives affect belief updating and confidence compared to well-defined Bayesian benchmarks. We plan to examine the mechanisms, with a particular focus on how narratives facilitate the process of mental simulation. These projects trace the journey of economic narratives from their inception and spread to their impacts on behaviors and beliefs, and unveil the underlying cognitive and social mechanisms.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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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.
80539 Planegg
Germany
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