Searching for Homo Economicus: Institutional Boundaries and Americans’ Construals of and Attitudes toward Markets

Economic sociologists agree that economic rationality is constructed and that morality and economic interests often intersect. Yet we know little about how Americans organize their economic beliefs or assess the morality of markets. We distinguish position taking (how people respond to opinion items) from construal (how respondents understand and structure their attitudes within a domain). Using data from the General Social Survey, we employ Relational Class Analysis to identify three subsets of respondents whose members construe economic markets in distinct ways. Few Americans embrace or reject a market understood in strict neoclassical terms. Most construe market exchange through a religious or political lens. Compared to the full sample, subsamples display markedly more structure in associations among responses, and between attitudes and sociodemographic predictors. Support for market solutions is associated with indicators of economic advantage in each subset, but religious and political identities predict pro-market views uniquely in particular subsets. Results illustrate the value of examining population heterogeneity in opinion data; identify and explain variations in how Americans’ understand markets; and illuminate the moral dimension in economic attitudes. Self-interest drives faith in markets, but only when people construe markets in ways consistent with their religious and political faiths.