The Priming Effect

I have had enough of this academic existential crisis and thought I had grown out of it after the Michaelmas break. Questions like 'what is economics? why am I here exactly? what good will it be to anyone?' had sprung up in oodles, caused a lot of furore and I had finally conquered them after a month-long introspection. Things made much more sense in the Hilary term and my mind could see the interconnections, intricacies and interrelations in my discipline more vividly and clearly than before. Things from the real world and the classroom had started to come in sync, life moved so beautifully smooth until this morning when Bang! I am hit with the biggest revelation.

All this while I had a sleeping hypothesis deep down that the discipline I was studying was having more subtle priming effects than I could imagine. I was aware of it, so I was always guarding myself against the ill effects, but a lot of my fellow friends in the economics circles were starting to become more self-centred and stingy. I do not blame my friends, they have been blinkered by approaches that sound perfectly rational and logical and have ended up internalising them.

I had once read somewhere about Amartya Sen, that he was known as an ‘economist with a heart’ – The metaphor had struck me and stayed with me all along college, I knew before undergrad that the discipline I was entering into was going to prepare me to be ‘heartless’. Somehow in the scheme of things, I was destined to meet Aleesha – my closest friend in college in whose company, I was able to put economics, ethics, morals in different compartments of my mind and carry on with the business of life. Those ideals never mingled, so no disturbances were created.

Of late, I was struck by the fact, that I had certain kind of tender emotions and completely selfless motives but my friends were just not able to understand! Especially now at the postgraduate level, I am forced to doubt myself at times, I just don’t reason the way the milieu around me does and I call up Aleesha often only to be reassured that I am not an oddity afterall.

Going down the memory lane, I remember complaining to one of my EcoSoc friends once in undergrad college, how the Economics Society had become more like a ‘Politics Society’. If you happened to stand near two ecosoc people at any random point in time, you were quite likely to hear bickering about a third ecosoc member, a very generous outpouring of jealousies and backbiting than any discussions about economics.

Do you notice something? All these friends I allude to in the previous sentences, were economists. ‘Strange correlation!’ I always thought in my head.

This morning I got to know that the relation was causal. My professor referred to it in her lecture today and I have been quite perturbed since then.

The finding is that economics and business majors are more likely to resemble homo-economicus than students from other majors. One explanation is that repeated maximisation exercises with agents who are self interested utility maximisers, make economics students more likely to mimic the behaviour in real life. Those lagrangians, hamiltonians had such grave impacts on people – I could never imagine.

Initially, research had found out that this could be the result of self-selection i.e. it may be the case that only ‘selfish, dishonest’ students chose to study economics. But later findings (especially the paper by Lopez-Perez and Spiegelman) reported significant treatment effects meaning that it is the teaching of economics and the learning that is occuring that explains the selfishnes (the problem of endogeneity is tackled using political affiliation as an instrumental variable in this paper).

I have strange feelings at the moment. Isn’t it a shame? The models were meant to be benchmarks and I was always reassured by my professors in undergrad that economics does not rule out altruistic behaviour, you can always incorporate it in the utility function of the agents. Unfortunately, those cases have ended up being side-lined to just some ‘special cases’ in the literature, analysed by behavioural economists only.

Seriously think its time for some change.

Disclaimer: Written by an economics Mphil student with no 'selfish' motives.

The link to the Perez-Spiegelman paper can be found here.