http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/04/economists-selfish-b.html
Just to confirm all our "pre-judices" eh.
Economists: selfish bastards
Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 4, 2008 1:55 AM | permalink
In the course of researching my next novel, I happened upon this old
paper by Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan, "Does
Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?" Its conclusions: Economics grad
students are more likely to free ride than the general public.
Economists are less generous than other academics in charitable giving.
Economics undergrads are more likely to defect in prisoner's dilemma
problems. Students are less likely to return found money after studying
economics but not after studying another subject like astronomy. No
wonder they call it "the dismal science."
A study by Gerald Marwell and Ruth Ames found that students of
economics are indeed much more likely to free-ride in
experiments that called for private contributions to public
goods. Their basic experiment involved a group of subjects who
were given an initial endowment of money, which they were to
allocate between two accounts, one “public,” the other
“private.” Money deposited in a subject's private account was
returned dollar for dollar to the subject at the end of the
experiment. Money deposited in the public account was first
pooled, then multiplied by some factor greater than one, and
then distributed equally among all subjects.
Under these circumstances, the socially optimal behavior is for
each subject to put her entire endowment in the public account.
But the individually most advantageous strategy is to put all of
it in the private account. The self-interest model predicts that
all subjects will follow the latter strategy. Most don't. Across
eleven replications of the experiment, the average contribution
to the public account was approximately 49 percent.
It was only in a twelfth replication with first-year graduate
students in economics as subjects that Marwell and Ames obtained
results more nearly consistent with the self-interest model.
These subjects contributed an average of only 20 percent of
their initial endowments to the public account, a figure
significantly less than the corresponding figure for
noneconomists (p.05).
Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/economics_frank/frank.html
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