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Rational Choice Theory: People
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The basic idea of rational choice theory is that patterns of behavior in societies reflect the choices made by individuals as they try to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs. In other words, people make decisions about how they should act by comparing the costs and benefits of different courses of action. As a result, patterns of behavior will develop within the society that results from those choices.
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At the same time that the neutrality with respect to aims is a strength of rational choice models, it is ... a weakness. This is so because in sociology one would also want to go beyond taking aims as exogenously given. One would also want to explain why people have the aims they have and why people have the utilities they have. Why do people attach high utilities to Rolex watches? Why do people sometimes behave altruistically? Why does industrialisation lead to alienation?
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Other rational choice theorists find a solution in the existence of reciprocity. They argue that where social exchanges are recurrent, rather than episodic, it is possible for cooperation to emerge as a rational strategy. People rapidly learn that cooperation leads to mutual advantage, even if it does not produce the maximum outcome for any one participant. They learn, that is to say, that cooperation, rather than pure self-interest, is the optimum strategy. Ridley (1996: Chapter 3) has argued that this must be seen as an instinctive response, as a genetically-programmed innate predisposition for cooperation and reciprocity. The question remains... whether such an instinct exists and, if it does, whether it is powerful enough to generate the wide range of cooperative and altruistic behaviour found in human societies.
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The idea of rational choice, where people compare the costs and benefits of certain actions, is easy to see in economic theory. Since people want to get the most useful products at the lowest price, they will judge the benefits of a certain object (for example, how useful is it or how attractive is it) compared to similar objects. Then they will compare prices (or costs). In general, people will choose the object provides the most benefits at the lowest price.
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