Publication Date:
2015-09-19
Description:
We studied the distributional preferences of an elite cadre of Yale Law School students, a group that will assume positions of power in U.S. society. Our experimental design allows us to test whether redistributive decisions are consistent with utility maximization and to decompose underlying preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs: fair-mindedness versus self-interest, and equality versus efficiency. Yale Law School subjects are more consistent than subjects drawn from the American Life Panel, a diverse sample of Americans. Relative to the American Life Panel, Yale Law School subjects are also less fair-minded and substantially more efficiency-focused. We further show that our measure of equality-efficiency tradeoffs predicts Yale Law School students' career choices: Equality-minded subjects are more likely to be employed at nonprofit organizations.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Fisman, Raymond -- Jakiela, Pamela -- Kariv, Shachar -- Markovits, Daniel -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Sep 18;349(6254):aab0096. doi: 10.1126/science.aab0096.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Economics, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. rfisman@bu.edu. ; Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. ; Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkely, CA, USA. ; Yale Law School, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26383958" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Administrative Personnel/*psychology
;
Adult
;
Attitude
;
*Career Choice
;
Employment
;
Female
;
Humans
;
Jurisprudence
;
Organizations, Nonprofit
;
*Power (Psychology)
;
Public Opinion
;
*Resource Allocation
;
Social Justice/*psychology
;
Students
;
United States
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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