MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

Department of Economics Seminar Series 

"Narrative Complexity & Decision-Making"

by

Görkem Destan

(TED University)

Date: November 17, 2025 (Monday)

Time: 14:00

Place: Fikret Görün Seminar Room (F106), FEAS - Building A

Abstract

​Understanding how individuals process complex information is crucial for designing effective communication strategies in public policy and economics. While recent research has highlighted the importance of narratives in shaping beliefs and behaviors (Shiller, 2017; Andre et al., 2022), little is known about the specific components that make a narrative complex and how these components affect individuals’ comprehension and decision-making. This project addresses this gap by systematically dissecting narrative complexity and investigating its behavioral consequences in a large-scale online survey experiment. We define narrative complexity through two distinct theoretical components: state complexity (number of elements in a narrative) and structure complexity (interconnections and causal loops among those elements). Using LLMs such as GPT-4o, we generate a series of policy-relevant narratives that isolate each complexity component by varying them one at a time while holding other dimensions constant. This procedure enables us to disentangle the specific contribution of each component to the perceived and experienced complexity of narratives. To causally identify the effects of narrative complexity, we implement a pre-registered online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample. Participants are randomly assigned to receive different narrative variants in a between-subjects design. We measure subjective complexity through comprehension tests and perceived complexity through pairwise comparisons with a baseline narrative (Gabaix & Graeber, 2023). This dual-measurement approach allows us to assess both how difficult a narrative is to process and how complex it appears to participants.