Because my research on farm animal welfare assumed people may care for humans and animals other than themselves, he asked me if I had the same problem. The answer is a definite no. Perhaps ag econ has drastically changed over the years, taking the Max U framework too seriously in the past when the economics profession never did.
Example: Jayson Lusk and I have a behavioral economics paper coming out in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, where we show that contrary to the Max U framework, there can be a thing as too much choice (duh!). The paper consists of four experiments, one of which shows that a significant portion of people are willing to voluntarily forgo choice and opt for a smaller choice set size, solely for the purposes of making the decision task easier.
The question is: are we behind the curve in the classroom as well? Are we at least mentioning some of the results of behavioral economics?