Behavior seminar

Du 12/04/2018 de 11:00 à 12:00

New building R2-21

KONOW James (Loyola Marymount University, USA)

Can Economic Ethics Affect Attitudes and Behavior?

Recent business scandals, economic upheavals and claims of broad types of unethical conduct among professional economists (e.g., List et al., 2001) have contributed to a growing discourse on returning economics to its origins as a “moral science” and on strengthening the emphasis on ethics in economics teaching and research, e.g., see Atkinson (2011), Bruni and Sugden (2013), DeMartino (2011), Sandel (2013), and Schiller and Schiller (2011). A now voluminous literature that began with Marwell and Ames (1981) and Carter and Irons (1991) asks “does studying economics lead to more self-interested behaviour?” Here we turn this question on its head and ask “does studying ethics in an economic context affect moral attitudes or behavior?” This presentation reports the results of two studies. “Does Studying Ethics Affect Moral Views?: An Application to Economic Justice” considers whether the oldest and most traditional form of ethics instruction, namely philosophical ethics, can influence views of economic justice using the responses in surveys to contextually rich vignettes. “An Experimental Study of the Behavioral Effects of Ethics in the Economics Classroom” reports the results of economics experiments conducted with students in introductory economics classes following lectures on ethics. The results are sometimes enigmatic: non-effects obtain, even when the costs of reporting an effect are low in the survey study, whereas significant effects sometimes appear, when participants have material stakes in the economics experiments. These findings suggest that considerable subtlety is required in contemplating types of ethics instruction and in interpreting the effects.