Economics education: literacy or mind framing? Evidence from a survey on the social building of trust in Portugal

This paper deals on the issue of whether or not studying economics has a relevant effect on molding the values and attitudes characteristic of the trust-building processes prevailing in a democratic society. Mainstream economics teaching, based on the self-interest model of rational, maximizing, individualistic representative agents, may well cause indoctrinating effects, creating or reinforcing both political conservatism and selfishness values and behaviors among economics students. This result is confirmed by most studies in relevant literature, but it may be otherwise explained by a so-called self-selection effect, suggesting that “economists are born, not made”. In this paper a contribution to this literature is made with more empirical evidence, namely the results of a survey entitled “Social Building of Trust in Portugal”, referring to a considerable diversity of samples (economics students, other students, ordinary citizens of two counties, urban and rural) and being applied in three different years: 2006, 2009 and 2012.