It's a common trope that studying economics makes people more selfish (see for example this New York Times article (paywalled), or this NPR article). However, is it true? As I've noted before, studying economics appears to have no effect on moral reasoning. However, most papers on similar topics do a pretty poor job of actually teasing out the effect of studying economics (see here or here, for example). Often, this is because the studies don't do a good job of controlling for who selects into studying economics in the first place. So, any effects might be attributable to differences in students before they study any economics.
So, I was interested to read this new article by Daniele Girardi (King's College London), Sai Madhurika Mamunuru (Whitman College), Simon Halliday (University of Bristol), and Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute), published in the Southern Economic Journal (open access). Girardi et al. look at the effect of studying intermediate microeconomics on measures of self-interest (derived experimentally using a dictator game), reciprocity (derived experimentally using a trust game), perceptions of self-interest and reciprocity (measured by survey responses to how other participants would respond in the dictator and trust games), and some measures of policy preferences.
The research participants were students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst:
Students from four different intermediate microeconomics courses and from one course outside of the social sciences comprise our sample. A course in “Nutrition and Metabolism” serves as a control non-economics course. The economics courses vary: two courses (which we call Conventional I and Conventional II) are fairly standard intermediate microeconomics courses using Pindyck and Rubinfeld (2012) and Perloff (2011); a third (Post Walrasian) course uses Bowles and Halliday (2022) and focuses on strategic interactions and contractual incompleteness alongside standard topics of optimization (crucially it contains behavioral experiments and models of social preferences); finally, the fourth course (Conventional plus social preferences), is an online course using Frank (2008). The four intermediate microeconomics courses all had the same enrollment prerequisites and identical description in the online enrollment system.
Students were surveyed at the beginning and the end of their course, which allowed Girardi et al. to employ a difference-in-differences approach. Essentially, this involves looking at the difference between students enrolled in the economics courses and students enrolled in nutrition course, before and after their course. If the change in behaviour or preferences for economics students was different than the change in behaviour for nutrition students, this could plausibly be attributed to the effect of studying economics.
Girardi et al. find that:
...a one-semester intermediate microeconomics course has little to no effect on experimental measures of social preferences or on expectations about other people's social preferences. Our estimates of the effect on measures of altruism and reciprocity are close to zero and do not differ across the differing content of the courses. We also find little evidence of an effect on the students' policy preferences or political orientations. The one exception concerns immigration: studying intermediate microeconomics (whatever the course content) seems to make students less opposed to highly restrictive immigration policies.
Even the last result about opposition to immigration policies only appears in one analysis, is based on responses to a single question, and is not robust to alternative specifications of the policy preference variables. So, studying economics appears to have no effect on selfishness or policy preferences. However, Girardi et al. note that:
The results could depend on the fact that the main effect of studying economics occurs at the introductory level, or that a single semester is too brief an exposure to produce a detectable effect.
That's possible (although Girardi et al. are quick to point out that that interpretation would be at odds with one other study that found a larger effect at intermediate than at introductory level). However, I would suggest that there is another good reason to doubt these results. The Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is well known within the discipline as being a heterodox department. It is not mainstream, and it seems to me that it is unlikely that it attracts a majority of mainstream economics students. The types of students who self-select into studying economics at Amherst may well be students who would not be swayed into selfishness by discussions of rational utility maximisation. Alternatively, even courses that are 'mainstream' by name may approach the subject very differently at Amherst than would occur at a more traditional economics department. This study tries to address this issue by including 'conventional' intermediate economics courses, that are taught using commonly used textbooks. However, the way that lecturers approach the teaching of the subject matters too, and that is very likely to be different at Amherst than at other universities.
So, unfortunately this study may tell us little about how the teaching of economics at a traditional economics department affects student selfishness. We likely need a broader study, that uses a similar approach, but either has a sample at a more traditional economics department or, even better, looks across several economics departments at different universities.
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