The first victim of such a “realistic” approach to economic phenomena was the figure of the homo economicus. It was not only modern psychology that rendered it implausible for Schmölders. Ethnographic research also suggested that the variety of economic exchanges in different cultures could be captured more adequately with the assumption of a “homo institutionalis” governed by unwritten customary laws of morality. … Rather, Schmölders suggested that economists should use the means of the neighboring social sciences in order to empirically scrutinize the “predictable, regular, and to a certain degree evocable behavior that may be called quasi-instinctive or quasi-automatic."

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 329