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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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