… consider the following. In the 1990s, another Cornell University economist, Robert Frank, tested the hypothesis that “exposure to the self-interest model commonly used in economics alters the extent to which people behave in self-interested ways.” Among the findings: Economics majors made less generous offers when playing the Ultimatum Game; economics professors gave less to charity than their university colleagues; and when asked to imagine they’d found somebody else’s $100 bill, economics students were three times more likely to say they’d keep the money than students from the astronomy department. “Economics training doesn’t make you more honest,” Frank says. “It’s wildly implausible. It would be like water running uphill.”