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      <title>Does studying economics decrease one’s morality? The Austrian case. by Karin Baumgartner</title>
      <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku</link>
      <description></description>
      <language>en-us</language>
      <pubDate>2022-05-17 06:44:14 UTC</pubDate>
      <lastBuildDate>2022-05-22 18:04:11 UTC</lastBuildDate>
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      <item>
         <title>Introduction</title>
         <author>karinbaumgartner70</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187104378</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<ul><li>The moral philosopher Adam Smith was among the first to discuss the effects of markets on the individual's behaviour.&nbsp;</li><li>Recent topics such as inequality and over-consumption render the topic of interaction of markets and morality even more important.</li><li>It is especially interesting to examine, how the choice of study influences our interaction with markets and our respective moral behaviour.</li><li>Many studies have been conducted on the topic. However, they were mainly conducted in the United States and are thus not directly comparable to or applicable for Austrian students.</li><li>These observations led us to conduct our own survey in Austria, in order to better understand the role of the choice of study subject in our market behaviour.</li></ul>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 06:58:35 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187104378</guid>
      </item>
      <item>
         <title>Why is a new study in Austria necessary?</title>
         <author>larissapetermaier</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187109546</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div>As stated, most of the existing research has been conducted in the United States. However, it is important to remember that the United States and Austria are far from being comparable. Here is why:</div><ul><li>The teaching of Economics defers between the United States and Austria. The former focusses on the neoclassical approach, with no or only very few subjects presenting different possible perspectives of economic thinking.</li><li>The liberal, residualist welfare state in the US entails critical differences compared to the Austrian corporatist-statist model (Esping-Andersen, 1998).&nbsp;</li><li>The U.S is considered a more liberal market economy, whereas Austria is far more conservative in its market guiding rules and considered a coordinated market economy (Schröder, 2019).</li></ul>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:01:46 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187109546</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Hypotheses</title>
         <author>larissapetermaier</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187110009</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div>Influenced by our research, we had three hypotheses we wanted to be ratified by our survey:</div><ul><li>Do students of business or economics act more selfishly than students of other fields?</li><li>Does a person's level of religiousness influence its moral behaviour?</li><li>Is a person's level of selfishness related to its gender?</li></ul>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:02:03 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187110009</guid>
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         <title>Methodology </title>
         <author>larissapetermaier</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187110199</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div>Survey consisting of 18 questions, which tested a person's level of selfish behaviour, consumption preferences and views on the distribution of money and power:<br><br></div><div><strong>Questions 1-4:</strong> <br>Indicators (participants field of study, gender, class &amp; how religious they sensed themselves).<br><br><strong>Questions 5-8:</strong>&nbsp; <br>SPI - Selfishness and personal interaction (how selfish the participants act -&gt; selfish is defined as pursuing personal benefits at the expense of a known detrimental effect on another known person).<br><br><strong>Questions 9-12:</strong>&nbsp; <br>MIAE - Market interaction (a person's readiness to give up personal benefits in order to contribute to a more significant societal, moral benefit).<br><br><strong>Question 13-18: <br></strong>ECHC - Egalitarian, cooperative vs hierarchical, competitive choices (individual’s support for competitive and meritocratic systems).<br><br>Preliminary sample:&nbsp;</div><ul><li>&nbsp;65 participants/students</li></ul>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:02:10 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187110199</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Conclusion</title>
         <author>larissapetermaier</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187110482</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div>Studying economics does not affect the individual’s level of selfishness or the individual's moral behaviour.<br><br>No significant difference between the student groups were observed.<br><br>Different outcome than in the US may be explained by,</div><ul><li>differences in the welfare state model between the countries,</li><li>differences between the real-world behaviour and the behaviour in designed experiment and/or</li><li>the new generation of students may have a different set of values than their peers decades ago.</li></ul><div><br>The noticeable difference in selfish behaviour between male and female students could be a fruitful lead for future inquiries.</div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:02:18 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187110482</guid>
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         <title>Findings - In relation to the previous US-studies</title>
         <author>karinbaumgartner70</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187115754</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>SPI score:</strong></div><ul><li>SPI score suggests that Humanities students act most selfish, followed by students of Natural Sciences, Business or Economics and Languages. Students of Medicine have the lowest SPI score.</li></ul><div><strong>MIAE score:</strong></div><ul><li>Students of Languages have the highest MIAE score, followed by students of Business or Economics, Natural Sciences and Humanities. The lowest score have medicine students again.</li></ul><div><strong>ECHC score:</strong></div><ul><li>ECHC score is the only one where Business or Economics students score the highest, followed by students of Humanities, Natural Sciences and Languages. Medicine students have the lowest score again.</li></ul><div><strong>Summarised findings for the Austrian case:</strong></div><ul><li>For our Austrian case, the present results do not suggest an effect of the individual's field of study on its moral behaviour.</li></ul><div><br></div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:05:28 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187115754</guid>
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         <title>Feedback from Peer Review</title>
         <author>dianadaiminger</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187126890</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong><em>Sample size too small &amp; survey cannot be compared with big American studies:</em></strong></div><div>We agree with the concern that it would be more optimal to have more participants in our survey to draw conclusions. However, this is also why we mentioned in our essay that our results are just preliminary and a first outlook on the findings of an ongoing study. We were generally curious about the morality of different students and even if we could have drawn a more precise conclusion with a bigger sample, we believe that we got a pretty good general idea of the mindsets of various kinds of students in the first step. The final results will solidify the statistical significance of the findings and will either reject or first findings or emphasise them. The latter being our expectation.<br>One also has to keep in mind that the USA is a much bigger country with many more students than Austria so even if we were able to come up with a sample size e.g. three times bigger than ours now, in absolute numbers it would still be much smaller compared to some US samples. Besides that, also the majority of US studies worked with a pretty small sample size, still ensuring significant results like the one of the prisoner dilemma with just 30 students. <br><br><strong>Critique that </strong><strong><em>"using papers from the '90 is not appropriate" and that "methodology part is too long":</em></strong></div><div>We understand that older literature might not represent today's situation in an appropriate way. However, one must note that there does not exist contemporary literature on that topic, which was relevant for our case. Recognising this lack in literature, we conducted our own survey and focused the main part of the essay on that, describing the highly relevant situation of today. <br><br><strong><em>Critique that there might be a non response bias in the survey and that "selfish people might not consider themselves being part of it":</em></strong></div><div>While of course it can always happen that someone isn't honest in a survey and makes themselves look better than they are, we have faith that since it was an anonymous survey, the participants would answer it honestly. And we don't believe that "only selfless people participated" because the survey was spread among many kinds of people and there were no direct questions like 'do you consider yourself selfish' that might trigger selfish people to not take part in the survey anymore, but rather focused on scenario based questions. However, we recognise the critique and will try to further improve the survey design and questions in following studies to further decrease the possibility of dishonest answers and a non-response bias.&nbsp;<br><br></div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:12:40 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187126890</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Essay</title>
         <author>karinbaumgartner70</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187134268</link>
         <description><![CDATA[]]></description>
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         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:17:19 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187134268</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Findings - In context of gender, religion &amp; class</title>
         <author>karinbaumgartner70</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187144892</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Gender:</strong></div><ul><li>One can observe significant gender-dependent differences.</li><li>SPI scores reveal that males tend to act twice as selfish as females.</li><li>Same pattern emerges for the ECHC score, with the aggregate male score being 40% higher than the female one.</li><li>Males also have a higher MIAE score than females. However, in this case, the scores are relatively close together compared to the other scores.</li></ul><div><strong>Religion:</strong></div><ul><li>No correlation was found.</li><li>Across all fields of study as well as gender, the average<br>score is always below the average of the respective scale, indicating that all participants are not very religious.</li></ul><div><strong>Class:&nbsp;</strong></div><ul><li>No correlation was found.</li><li>More than three-quarters of the respondents attributed them to the middle or upper-middle class.</li><li>Between these two classes, no significant differences concerning the selfishness of their individual behaviour can be observed.</li><li>Possible differences between people's perception of their own class and their actual socio-economic status renders this indicator unreliable. Future studies should control for these aspects.</li></ul><div><br></div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:24:02 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187144892</guid>
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      <item>
         <title></title>
         <author>karinbaumgartner70</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187169397</link>
         <description><![CDATA[]]></description>
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         <pubDate>2022-05-17 07:42:10 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187169397</guid>
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      <item>
         <title>Gender difference</title>
         <author>larissapetermaier</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187202142</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>ECHC score</strong> - scale: 0 (egalitarian) - 25 (meritocratic &amp; pro competition)&nbsp; <br><strong>MIAE score</strong> - scale: 0 (highly selfless &amp; egalitarian) - 8 (highly selfish &amp; egoistic) <br><strong>SPI score</strong> - scale: 0 (highly selfless) - 8 (highly selfish)&nbsp;<br><br></div>]]></description>
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         <pubDate>2022-05-17 08:06:47 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2187202142</guid>
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         <title>Referenced literature</title>
         <author>manuelcarli</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/karinbaumgartner70/rrs5dtb7kmyzb6ku/wish/2194602860</link>
         <description><![CDATA[]]></description>
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         <pubDate>2022-05-22 15:53:54 UTC</pubDate>
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