Z:gnu-www-ja-frank--6a33bf-The basic question we investig/en

The basic question we investigate in this paper is whether exposure to the self-interest model alters the extent to which people behave in self-interested ways. The paper is organized into two parts. In the first, we report the results of a series of empirical studies &mdash; some our own, some by other investigators &mdash; that support the hypothesis that economists behave in more self-interested ways. By itself, this evidence does not demonstrate that exposure to the self-interest model is the cause of more self-interested behavior, although, as we will see, a case can be made for this proposition on a priori grounds. An alternative interpretation is that economists may simply have been more self-interested to begin with, and this difference was one reason they chose to study economics. In the second part of the paper, we present preliminary evidence that exposure to the self-interest model does in fact increase self-interested behavior.