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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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