The Role of Higher Education in Shaping Students’ Policy Preferences: Does exposure to the assumptions prevalent in economics and sociology curricula prime attributions of poverty?

Abstract

A survey experiment was conducted to study to what extent the assumptions about what drives human behavior in neoclassical economic theory and classical sociological theory drive attribution of poverty. Poverty attributions were divided into internal and external attribution. It was hypothesized that respondents primed by the economic assumptions will attribute poverty to the individual while respondents primed by the sociology assumptions will attribute poverty to external causes. No average treatment effect was found. However, significant heterogenous treatment effects were found for the effect of sociology on internal attribution among future social science and STEM students.