by ‘Rational choice’ history — a case of models not fitting the facts Rational choice history is in a worse situation than that of either mechanistic biology in the seventeenth century or of sociobiology today. The analogy would be appropriate if it were mainly a question of refining the theories and of gathering more evidence. One could refine theory by incorporating bounded rationality and quasi-rational choice, so as to match more closely the way in which actual decisions are made. One could gather more evidence by paying careful attention to sources that illuminate the beliefs and goals of the actors … The need for modesty appears in two ways. First, as I have been at some pain to emphasize, one should avoid the postulate of hyperrationality. Collective
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Economics
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‘Rational choice’ history — a case of models not fitting the facts
Rational choice history is in a worse situation than that of either mechanistic biology in the seventeenth century or of sociobiology today. The analogy would be appropriate if it were mainly a question of refining the theories and of gathering more evidence. One could refine theory by incorporating bounded rationality and quasi-rational choice, so as to match more closely the way in which actual decisions are made. One could gather more evidence by paying careful attention to sources that illuminate the beliefs and goals of the actors …
The need for modesty appears in two ways. First, as I have been at some pain to emphasize, one should avoid the postulate of hyperrationality. Collective action, iterated games, and credibility are simple ideas that can be and have been refined to yield rococo (or baroque?) constructions that no longer bear any relation to observable behavior. To be useful, they have to be constrained by what we know about the limitations of the human mind. Second, because formal analysis has nothing to say about the motivation of the agents, it cannot by itself yield robust predictions. Although it is extremely useful to know that the structure of material interests in a given case is that of a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, that fact does not by itself imply anything about what the agents will do. If they have nonmaterial or even nonrational motivations, they might behave very differently from the noncooperative behavior we would expect if they were exclusively swayed by material interests. If they are in fact observed to cooperate, then we will have to search for nonmaterial or nonrational motivations. Rational choice theory tells us what to look for, not what we will find.