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Rational Choice Theory: Theories
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Like most rational choice theorists, social exchange theory’s advocates sometimes make proposals for resurrecting the “species of homo economicus” (Friedman, 1996:.3), albeit in partly modified forms. They explicitly seek to rehabilitate homo economicus in the image of what is described as a new, plain “economic man” (Homans, 1961: 79-81), which implies a resort to a sort of primitive folk psychology, like in the case of rational choice theory. Recently, some rational choice theorists have renamed such an economic man as homo socio-economicus (Lindenberg, 1990) or homo economicus maturus (Frey and Oberholzer-Gee, 1997). Ironically, such an actor concept seems closer to homo sociologicus that exchange and other rational choice theorists reject than to homo economicus in the strict sense, as an assumed embodiment of perfect rationality and driven by the ingrained propensity to exchange for maximum gain. Admittedly, following Pareto and Weber. homo sociologicus is “an advance over homo oeconomicus.
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Not all rational choice theorists have relied on behavioural psychology in this way. Indeed, many remain quite deliberately agnostic about the ultimate determinants of human action. Following the example of many economists, they have seen their task simply as the construction of logically coherent, predictive theories of human action. Individuals, they argue, act as if they were fully rational and, therefore, rationality can be taken as an unproblematic starting point. There is no need to dig any deeper into individual psychology: whatever psychology may say about motivation does not affect the fact that social relations and exchange processes can be understood as if all individuals were purely rational actors. This argument is tenable only if a rather extreme positivist view of knowledge is adopted, and most realists would expect to find some attention given to the psychological basis of motivation and, therefore, to attempts to test out the adequacy of particular psychological assumptions.
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"This is the first serious critique of the rational choice school of political science. Donald Green and Ian Shapiro demonstrate that, half a century after its founding and despite its promise of creating a parsimonious, rigorous, and universally applicable political science, the rational choice school has little to show by way of empirical confirmation of its grand hypotheses. In coping with these disappointments, its proponents have engaged in a shell game of efforts to defend their claims of rigorous science, universal applicability, and superiority to all other explanatory theories. Green and Shapiro puncture these pretenses in their masterful treatments of the rational choice literatures dealing with such major themes as voter turnout and behavior, interest groups and 'free-riding,' and legislative behavior and spatial theories of party competition. They suggest a limited and constructive role for theories of the rational choice genre."—Gabriel Almond, Stanford University
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Advocates of rational choice theory in political science have been perceived by their critics as attempting to establish an intellectual hegemony in contemporary social science, to the detriment of alternative methods of research. The debate has gained a nonacademic audience, hitting the pages of the New York Times and the New Republic. In the academy, the antagonists have expressed their views in books, journal articles, and at professional conferences.
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In rational choice theories, individuals are seen as motivated by the wants or goals that express their 'preferences'. They act within specific, given constraints and on the basis of the information that they have about the conditions under which they are acting. At its simplest, the relationship between preferences and constraints can be seen in the purely technical terms of the relationship of a means to an end. As it is not possible for individuals to achieve all of the various things that they want, they must ... make choices in relation to both their goals and the means for attaining these goals. Rational choice theories hold that individuals must anticipate the outcomes of alternative courses of action and calculate that which will be best for them. Rational individuals choose the alternative that is likely to give them the greatest satisfaction (Heath 1976: 3; Carling 1992: 27; Coleman 1973).
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These essays should not be read as technical contributions to contemporary rational-choice theory. None of the authors claim special experti se in that body of theory. They ... do not discuss issues of central concern w ithin that literature, such as the intractability of coordination problems for g ame theoretic analysis. The essays nonetheless reflect a clear understanding of the core of rational choice, a commitment to explanation of behavior as purposi ve and explanation of both individual and societal-level phenomena in ways that are grounded in micro-level processes of choice. The authors also largely avoid common misconceptions about rational-choice analysis, such as the erroneous bel iefs that rational choice necessarily assumes conservative politics, views peopl e as ruthlessly self-seeking or assumes they possess complete information. Inde ed some authors discuss recent rational-choice-based analyses of gender and emot ions, topics that have been traditionally viewed as beyond the scope of rational -choice analysis.
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