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I have some specialized information about and a vested interest in the
literature Barkley Rosser described and Sam Bostaph inquired about.
Therefore I am taking the liberty of responding--at least tangentially-- to
Sam's questions.
1. The literature on this topic contains quite a few different measures of
"selfish." The article that I recall as starting the literature (I have not
gone back and reread it, so this is from memory, which may be faulty) was
by Marwell and Ames, in the early 1980's, entitled something like
"Economists Free-Ride, Does Anyone Else?" in J Public Econ. It (again, as I
recall) performed prisoner's dilemma games, and found that economics
students defected (failed to cooperate) far more than other students. Two
defects were that : the situation is artificial, since it is in a "lab
setting," and the econ students were (as I recall) GRAD students, while
other students were undergrads. Grad students in econ, of course, know a
whole lot more about these games than your random undergrad...
2. A major contribution by Bob Frank and co-authors Gilovich and Regan
appeared in the AER in 1993. The article contained (as I recall) a summary
of studies up to 1993, but then performed an experiment" of sorts. Frank
wanted to know whether the alleged "selfishness" or "noncooperativeness" of
economics students was because "we"TEACH them to be selfish, or because
people with this personality trait self selected into econ. Their way of
investigating this was to administer a questionnaire at the beginning of a
principles of econ course, and again at the end, and see if the degree of
"cooperativeness" (not quite the right term, as you'll see) decreased
"because" they took econ. The control group was intro classes in a science
(astronomy, as I recall). There were 4 questions administered. The two I
remember were, approximately:
i. You lost $100 at a football game, in an envelope with your name on it.
What is the probability it would be returned"
ii. You found such an envelope with someone else's name on it. Would you
return it?
As usual in such situations the "I would return it" response was a much
higher % of the population that the estimates of what "everyone else" would
do...
Anyway, the econ classes seemed to show a significant decrease in
"cooperativeness," while the astronomy class did not. Conclusion: studying
Econ TEACHES people to be "uncooperative." (I use a more colorful word when
describing this result to my senior undergrads...)
Those of us raised on the Lester Machlup controversy, and Friedman's 1953
comment on why the entire discussion was wrong-headed, would of course
wonder whether what people SAY they would do is what they would ACTUALLY
do. That idea, plus my colleague Tony Yezer's view that "those freshman at
the beginning of econ might have had an unrealistically and naively
optimistic idea of how the world works. If the Econ course got their views
closer to the way the world really is, that is a DESIRABLE teaching
outcome--we are trying to give them a useful depiction of the economic
world" led us (Yezer is the "brains" behind this) to do the following:
3. In an article published in the J Econ Perspectives Winter 1996, Yezer,
Paul Poppen (a psychologist) and I reported on the following REAL MONEY
experiment. We dropped envelopes in a series of upper level econ and
nonecon courses. The stamped envelopes contained $10 and a note: "Here is
the money I borrowed from you for lunch. Thanks." We had to find classes we
could sneak into without being seen, etc etc etc. To make a long story
short, econ students mailed back a SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER proportion of the
envelopes than did students in other disciplines. In short, our experiment
involving REAL MONEY and REAL BEHAVIOR got results that CONTRADICTED the
earlier literature. Obviously, our experiment is subject to any number of
possible problems, but it does at least call into question the prevailing
line of results. The same issue of JEP contains a response by Frank, who (I
think) continues to discount our results.
4. I cannot supply the reference, but David Laband has published at least
one paper since which examines the dues-paying behavior of professional
economists versus other social scientists (political science types and
sociologists, as I recall). The gimmick here is the voluntary nature of
paying the higher rate if you are a more senior faculty. As I recall, he
finds that economists voluntarily pay the higher rate significantly more
that the other disciplines (but this is only my memory--it needs to be
checked if you want to quote it).
Hope this is a useful response to Sam
Bob Goldfarb
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