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Attitudes Toward Cooperative Behavior

Frank, Gilovich and Regan review research and report their own findings in the very specific area of the possible effects of training in economics on individuals' attitudes toward cooperative behavior. Joseph Campbell discusses the effect of myths on peoples lives and, in particular, what people do to replace myths when the society does not provide them. Though they deal with very different subjects both articles discuss the relationship between our overall narratives and interpretations of our lives and the effects they have on how we live.

Frank et al. discuss a number of experiments that test people's willingness to cooperate. These measures offer the possibility of improved outcomes if all players cooperate, but, since there are no guarantees of cooperation the decision to do so is an act of judging whether or not people are more likely to act out of pure self-interest or to act cooperatively. Previous studies and the tests by Frank et al. indicated that not only do people training in economics or teaching economics appear to be less inclined to take the cooperative route in such tests, they also become less inclined to do so as they have more training. In addition, they discovered that it may even be possible to detect the effect among types of economics training, i.e., that varying approaches from one teacher to another produce different degrees of belief in the self-interest model. Frank et al. discuss a number of these studies and perform some experiments of their own. In all cases, they allow, the findings might have some basis other than the fact that the students had elected to major in economics or had taken a course in economics. But the findings were consistent enough and strong enough to indicate that there may be some truth to the claim that the study of economics (primarily because of the way it is taught) leads people to picture themselves as living in a world where self-interest is always first and where ...

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Attitudes Toward Cooperative Behavior. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 20:17, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682294.html