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

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.