Does studying economics make you selfish and conservative? A new study casts some doubts on a popular hypothesis

Daniele Girardi

(Feb 2, 2024; Spanish version published on Nada es Gratis)

According to a widely shared concern, some college professors may exert a controversial influence on the preferences and political opinions of their students. To your possible surprise, I’m talking about economics professors, including (in fact, especially) the most conventional ones.

Researchers studying human behaviour have hypothesized that studying economics might have the unintended effect of reducing generosity and prosocial, cooperative behaviour among students. Moreover, studying economics might push students to the right politically.

There are good reasons - both theoretical and empirical - to entertain the hypothesis that studying economics might make you more selfish and politically conservative.

First, consider the “selfishness” part of the hypothesis. College students attending an economics course are sure to encounter a strange and pretty unlikeable type of human being, who only cares about their own personal interest and is completely indifferent to the fate of others. No, I don’t mean the professor! I’m talking about Homo Economicus: the type of human being that populates the formal models found in economics textbooks.

Homo economicus is not a real person but a shorthand for the set of assumptions that these models make about human behavior. People are assumed to be not only fully rational, but also completely self-interested: Homo economicus just wants to maximize their individual payoff (whatever that means in the specific context), with zero concern for anybody else. While several strands of research in economics now embrace a much richer view of human motives, the models found in undergraduate textbooks are still almost all based on the self-interest assumption (which is probably not good pedagogy, and mostly driven by inertia – but this is another discussion).

Economics students presented with self-interest as the norm for human behavior might become more likely to adopt it themselves. After all, psychological studies have documented strong “exposure effects” in social learning: individuals tend to adopt cultural traits that they are exposed to and that they perceive as common. Being repeatedly exposed to the “self-interest” rule of behavior might therefore increase self-interested behaviour (and thus reduce generosity and cooperation) in students.

Now turn to the “economics makes you conservative” part (which, to be clear, is not necessarily related to selfishness: a conservative can be generous and cooperative!). The simplified models presented in economics college courses emphasize how the interaction of many Homo Economicus types in perfectly competitive markets results in efficient outcomes. Students might fail to fully appreciate the unrealistic nature of assumptions like perfect competition and adopt an overenthusiastic view of unregulated markets.

There is some evidence that economics students are more self-interested and politically conservative than their peers. But these simple comparisons cannot tell us whether these differences reflect a causal effect of studying economics, or whether selfish or conservative types are simply more likely to choose economics (a “selection” effect, as researchers call it).

In a new study, a research team including Sai Madhurika, Simon Halliday, Samuel Bowles, and I, devised a strategy to test the hypothesis that economics makes you selfish and conservative empirically. Although the hypothesis is plausible in theory, the preferences and policy views of the sample of students we analysed didn’t seem to be affected significantly by economics education. Maybe economics does not make you selfish or conservative after all!

Here is what we did in our study. We focused on a sample of students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, including four courses in Intermediate Microeconomics (the “treated” group), and one large course in Nutrition (the “control” group). Intermediate Microeconomics is the course that exposes undergraduate students most intensively to models based on the self-interest (or Homo Economicus) assumption.

We got 207 students from these courses (out of a total of 295 enrolled) to complete an online survey. This included games with real monetary stakes designed to measure whether a player’s behaviour is consistent with (or, conversely, deviates from) the Homo Economicus model. We also asked players to guess what other players would do (again with real money to be potentially gained). This allowed us to measure to what extent these students expected other people to conform to the self-interest assumption. Finally, we asked questions eliciting students' policy preferences on topics such as economic and environmental regulations, trust in government, market efficiency, and immigration.

Importantly, each student in our sample completed the survey twice: at the beginning of the semester (before being exposed to the course materials) and then again at the end. In this way we could compare how preferences changed during the semester in the group of students receiving the “Intermediate Microeconomics” treatment and in the control group. This allowed us to assess and factor in any systematic pre-existing differences between the two groups (the “selection effects” mentioned above) and isolate the causal impact of economics education.

We found little support for the hypothesis that economics makes you selfish or conservative. Yes, the economics students did start the semester with a vastly more favourable opinion of markets, slightly more to the right politically, and with slightly lower generosity. But this seems to be a “selection” effect, not an effect of studying economics: changes in preferences and political opinions during the semester for the students “treated” with the Intermediate Microeconomics courses were comparable to those experienced by the control (non-economics) students.

There is only one potential exception: economics students came to express less opposition to a highly restrictive statement about immigration policy. This may point to an effect of studying economics different from the ones traditionally hypothesized. However, our results are not conclusive on this aspect. Before claiming that “economics makes you opposed to immigration” we will need further research.

It is important to stress that no single study can settle this question (or any other question in the social sciences, for that matter). Our research provides one valuable data point, but many more experiments, exploring different settings and deploying various strategies, are needed to form a clearer picture.

Still, our study casts doubt on the commonplace view that economics makes you more selfish or conservative. Why might the mechanisms I described at the outset fail to materialize? Maybe a college course does not have a deep enough influence. Or it might be that students, even when studying simplified models that assume self-interest, understand that economics is not purely about selfishness. As Montesquieu, Voltaire, Smith and other 18th century thinkers forcefully argued, markets can also promote honesty and cooperation. These motives are as important as self-interest in making markets work. Adam Smith, for example, contrasted the probity of merchants with the untrustworthiness of ambassadors and advanced possible reasons for the difference. Students in today’s economics courses might well marvel that in markets, even when interacting with total strangers, adherence to social norms of respect for others’ property rights and reciprocating goodwill (e.g., not stealing the other’s goods) can be the basis for mutually beneficial exchange.