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time, it happened to be an away game at the stadium of an opposing team. My friend and his brother-in-law flew out to the city where the game was being played and headed for the stadium wearing jerseys with his son’s name and team on them.
As they approached the stadium, though, they began to be confronted by fans of the opposing team. Seeing the visitors’ jerseys, the fans jeered and shouted threats at my friend — some even threw themselves in my friend’s path and asked him what he thought he was doing. My friend’s brother-in- law tried to make peace, yelling things like: “This man’s son is starting in his first NFL game! You should buy him a drink!” The opposing team’s fans didn’t seem to care, and my friend came close to turning back and watching
the game from the safety of his hotel room. The two pressed on, though, and finally made it safely to their seats.
This story shows how risky — even dangerous — it can be to violate certain social norms. It’s not against the law to cheer for a visiting team; in fact, it would be illegal to try to stop someone from doing so. Still, my friend found himself walking into a situation where cheering for the visitors was such a violation of social norms that he could have been seriously hurt. He was free to ignore that norm — and he did — but it was at his own peril.
Rational — and Irrational — Choices
So at any given moment, you have choices — choices within, among, and outside of social norms. Understanding social norms is one of the things that sociologists do best. Collecting data about large groups and understanding aggregate decisions by hundreds or thousands of people . . . that’s the meat and potatoes of sociology.
For Durkheim, that was all sociology needed to do. Other sociologists, though, have argued that a sociological theory is incomplete if it doesn’t explain how social facts play out at the individual level. It may be convenient to imagine that one social fact (for example, a country’s religious makeup) directly affects another (for example, that country’s suicide rate) — but the actual fact of the matter is that social facts affect one another by affecting individual people. Spain doesn’t “decide” to have a certain suicide rate; individual Spaniards decide for themselves whether or not to take their lives. Even Durkheim, for all his focus on social facts, offered theories about why a certain social fact (religion, the economy, war) might make an individual person more or less likely to commit suicide — thus affecting the country’s suicide rate. Sociologists don’t need to become psychologists, but they do need to have some idea of why people make the choices they do.
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Making rational choices — or, at least, trying to
To understand how or why a person makes choices in society, it makes sense to begin with the assumption that everyone at least tries to be rational in his or her decision-making. After that, you can consider how and why people often seem to be irrational in the choices they make. In the following sections, I explain how what sociologists and economists refer to as rational choice theory (or, sometimes, rational action theory) works in situations from car shopping to date shopping.
Understanding rational choice theory
Besides sociology and psychology, another social science that seeks to scientifically understand human behavior is economics. For centuries, economists have operated under the basic assumption that people are rational creatures who will, in general, make the choices they feel are best for themselves. This is the principle of rational choice, which most economists and many sociologists believe is the best way to understand individual human behavior. They believe that even in cases where someone’s actions seem inexplicable, there is probably a self-serving motive behind those actions. Understanding human behavior, in this view, means figuring out exactly how people believe they will benefit from the choices they make.
It’s obvious what this means in economic terms: People will — or at least, they’re supposed to — choose the savings account with the highest interest rate, or buy a product from the retailer who offers the lowest price. But reallife decisions, even decisions about relatively simple economic matters, are rarely that clear cut.
Say you’re shopping for a car. You’d like to get a bargain, but of course you’re not going to just buy the cheapest car you can possibly buy! There are some amenities you need and value in a car, and you understand that in general, more expensive cars are going to have more of these features.
Even then, a certain amount of money — say, $25,000 — might buy any of dozens or hundreds of different cars. There are several choices you need to make about what aspects of a car you value. For example, you might consider:
How much is it worth to you to have a new car versus a used one?
Would you rather have a very reliable car, or a very high-performing one?
How much does it matter whether your car is fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly?
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Does it matter whether or not the car is made in your country? Would you pay more for a domestic car versus an imported car?
Does it matter how the car looks? If so, what color or model do you want, and how much extra would you pay to get it?
It’s a complicated decision — and you’ll never find a car in any price range that has all the features you want — but social scientists who believe in the principle of rational choice argue that you do know the answers to all of the above questions, and when you go car shopping, you will buy the car that comes closest to meeting all your different needs.
Applying rational choice to non-financial decisions
What about decisions that fall outside the strictly economic realm, though? What about the decisions you make that have nothing to do with money as such? Are those decisions “rational,” too? Indeed they are, many economists and sociologists believe.
Consider romantic relationships. In many ways it seems like you don’t “choose” your partner; rather, a relationship just happens. People say things like, “when I met Darlene, I just knew it was right,” or “all of a sudden it had been two years and bang! I found myself engaged.”
The fact of the matter is, though, that unless you live in a society where marriages are 100 percent arranged by parents and family, you do have a choice in whom you marry. People even talk about it this way. “I’ve been looking for someone like you,” someone will say, and the response may be, “I was hoping
you would offer to take me out on a date, and I knew I would accept your offer.”
Just as with cars, people may make a range of choices about what characteristics they’re looking for in a romantic partner.
Do you want someone who has a similar job to yours, or a different one?
Does it matter to you how much money the person makes? (Be honest!)
Does it matter to you how much education the person has, or what they studied?
How much does physical attractiveness matter to you? (Again, be honest!) Are there certain characteristics, like hair color or height, that especially matter to you?
Does it matter whether your partner shares your religious background, or comes from the same area you do?
Does it matter whether your partner shares your race or ethnic background?
Does it matter who your partner’s friends and family are?
Does it matter what your partner’s leisure interests are? Is it important that they be similar to yours?
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Art cars
If one challenge for rational choice theorists |
discovered that at the high end of the car |
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is understanding how people’s personal deci- |
market, buyers and sellers talk about cars less |
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sions about things like love and relationships |
as though they were cars and more as though |
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are “rational,” another big challenge is under- |
they were works of art. Much attention is given |
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standing how and why people buy art. How do |
to the person who designed the car, the com- |
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people even begin to place a value on a painted |
pany that built it, and the context in which it was |
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canvas that serves little purpose beyond hang- |
built and sold — just as would be the case for |
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ing on the wall? |
a work of art. |
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It turns out that they place a high degree of |
By contrast, if you’re buying a relatively cheap |
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importance on knowing who the artist is. If the |
car that will just get you from place to place, |
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artist is someone well known, perhaps someone |
you probably won’t be sitting around with the |
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with an interesting personal story like Vincent |
seller talking about the model’s history and ped- |
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van Gogh (who cut off his own ear) or Jackson |
igree. My friend Paul was selling an old beat-up |
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Pollock (who tore his way through the New |
car for the appropriately low price of $500, and |
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York art world, shocking and delighting people |
he received an e-mail from a prospective buyer |
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with his paint-splattered canvases), buyers will |
asking him a number of complicated questions |
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place a high value on almost any work bearing |
about the car. Paul’s thought was to respond, |
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that artist’s name. |
“The answer to your first question is: five hun- |
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Sociologists Joel Podolny and Marya Hill- |
dred dollars. The answer to every one of your |
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other questions is: five hundred dollars.” |
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Popper studied the market for cars, and they |
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Of course these things do matter, and online matchmaking sites take advantage of that fact to pair their members with one another. Some such sites boast surprisingly high success rates, suggesting that an algorithmic approach to romance might not be fundamentally incompatible with human happiness.
The rational choice theorists might seem to have it all sealed up: Even when it comes to something as intimate and personal as love and marriage, people are rational decision-makers who make choices that will give them maximum value.
Or are they? Sometimes people make choices that don’t seem very rational.
Can rational choice theory explain bad decisions?
D’oh! Making poor choices
Rational choice theory makes a world of sense when people are making choices that actually make sense — but what about when they aren’t?
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Often people make choices that just don’t seem to be in their own selfinterest. Isn’t this a problem for economists and sociologists who believe people are rational choice makers?
When I was a teenager my parents often found themselves questioning my rationality — for example, when a friend and I tried to bicycle halfway across Minnesota on the shoulder of an interstate freeway — but they weren’t the first ones to notice that people sometimes make inexplicable decisions. In this section, I go through four of the biggest challenges to rational choice theory. Do people’s decisions make any sense at all?
Challenge #1: Sometimes people make sub-optimal choices
What does “sub-optimal” mean? It means that sometimes people make choices that aren’t their best (that is, most optimal) choices. You might buy a car from one dealer when the dealer right next door has a much better car selling for the same amount of money. That’s not very rational . . . is it? Well, maybe it is. This view of rationality is called bounded rationality: You make the best decisions you can, based on the information you have time to collect.
No one has all the time in the world, and it takes time to gather the information you need to make a good choice. One of the decisions you have to make when you’re making a purchase, or a career choice, or a choice of spouse, is how much time you can afford to spend learning about all your options. Maybe you’ve just spent all weekend visiting several dealerships, and the car you chose to buy is the best bargain available at any of those dealerships. Sure, you may have found a better bargain if you visited the next dealer down . . .
but then why not visit the next one as well, and the next and the next and the next? At some point you have to decide that you’ve spent enough time searching to make a reasonably well-informed choice. There is, after all, somewhere you want to actually go in your car!
Challenge #2: Sometimes people deliberately make irrational choices
What if you know you’re being irrational?
Millions of people around the world gamble, putting billions of dollars at risk at casinos, in lotteries, and with bookies. They do this despite the fact that, on average, gambling is a losing proposition — governments run lotteries to make up budget shortfalls, and casino proprietors can reap fabulous profits. Sure, you might hit it big at the slots or in the lottery, but probably you’ll lose. The house always makes sure that the odds are in its favor.
You know that, and you still choose to gamble. Why? You might choose to do so for entertainment value, knowing that your losses are essentially what you pay for an exciting night at the casino. Many people, though, don’t see it that way — they play to win, even if they know that on average they won’t. Why would they do this?
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People are sometimes irrational in ways like this — but they’re also predictably irrational. Social scientists have demonstrated a range of ways that people can predictably be tricked into making irrational decisions:
Psychologists have discovered that people predictably respond to irregular reward patterns, so a slot machine is consistently much more addictive than, say, a change machine. You know that every time you put a dollar into a change machine you’ll be rewarded with exactly four quarters. What fun is that?
Economists have discovered that people consistently value near-term rewards over long-term rewards — so $20 now may be worth more to you than $25 next month. Credit card companies understand this principle, and they have great success offering huge amounts of immediate cash in exchange for long-term payments that may end up being over double the amount of the original loan.
By creating associations, marketers know that they can influence people’s purchasing decisions. If you see a celebrity you admire drinking a particular brand of soda, you place a greater value on that soda even if you wouldn’t choose it over a competitor in a taste test.
These are irrationalities in human behavior — but at least they’re known irrationalities. They can be incorporated into theories about human behavior; even when people are irrational, they’re often still very predictable.
Head in the stars, feet on the ground
The writer Isaac Asimov was, by any account, a brilliant man: Besides penning some of the greatest science fiction stories of all time, he wrote hundreds of nonfiction books on everything from Shakespeare to biochemistry to the Bible. You would certainly think you could count on him to be rational.
And yet Asimov had an irrational fear of flying. He rode in airplanes twice when he was in the military during World War II, but after his discharge he never again flew anywhere. As his fame grew and he was in demand for speaking engagements in far-flung places, he and his wife would drive long distances — even though Asimov surely knew that on average,
your chances of being killed in an accident are significantly greater if you drive across the country than if you fly the same distance.
Do people such as Isaac Asimov present a problem for social scientists? On the one hand, a story like this makes it seem like people are completely unfathomable — you can never predict human behavior. On the other hand, Asimov is an exception. Most people don’t have a fear like Asimov’s, and if they can afford to will choose to fly rather than drive long distances. Whether or not sociologists think of themselves as believers in “rational choice,” all of sociology rests on the assumption that on average, people’s behavior is at least somewhat predictable.
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Challenge #3: Emotion
All this talk of “predictability” and “rational choice” makes people seem like computers — maybe computers with some programming quirks, but computers nonetheless. What about emotion? Don’t people do things such as:
Marry for love, even when it doesn’t make “sense”?
Strike out in anger without stopping to think about the consequences?
Overeat to fill emotional needs?
Respond to emotional appeals for money and other support?
Have a hard time working because they’re very sad about something that’s happened to them?
How can anyone claim to understand human behavior without taking account of emotion?
An economist or a sociologist who believes in rational choice models of human behavior might respond to that challenge by pointing out that emotion actually plays less of a role in our decision-making than it might seem. For example, even if it seems to people like they’re marrying for love, on average people are actually quite precise about marrying people who are similar to them. Stories about star-crossed lovers who pursue their romance against all odds make for great plays and movies, but most people, most of the time, don’t fall helplessly into doomed love affairs — they conveniently fall in love with coworkers or classmates with whom they have a lot in common.
Emotion often follows rationality, rather than the other way around. (Oddly, this also works with beliefs and actions — people’s beliefs often follow their actions rather than vice-versa. See Chapter 13 for more on this.) So although it certainly sometimes happens that people get carried away with emotion and commit self-destructive acts or do things that seem to make no sense, social scientists have observed that on average, people do in fact act rationally — or at least, predictably.
On a psychological level, extreme cases of irrationality caused by strong emotion may be associated with depression or schizophrenia: psychological disorders that occur for known reasons and are often treatable with medication and therapy. When people find that their emotions are tending to get the better of them, causing them to make choices that harm themselves or others, they often try to manage that irrationality and put themselves back on track.
Challenge #4: Altruism
Altruism refers, in a word, to generosity. When you offer a service or a gift with no thought of reward, that is pure altruism. When you offer something for a small reward (like a t-shirt or a hug), that’s still generosity — even if it’s
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not pure altruism. The existence of this kind of prosocial behavior may be the Achilles’ heel of rational choice theory.
Of course, most people are not Mother Teresa. In many cases, when we give things away, we get other things in return. For example:
A major donor to a museum or a college may be rewarded by having a building named after them, and may be given a seat on a board of directors, yielding valuable social and professional connections.
When you give your boyfriend or girlfriend a birthday gift, you cause them to feel more attached to you and thus gain security in your relationship — plus, when it’s your birthday they will probably turn right around and give you a gift of comparable value.
When you volunteer your time to an organization, you are gaining potentially valuable experience and the social prestige of being seen to give your time away. Plus, you may be having fun and/or being directly rewarded with free services or products from that organization.
All this being true, it’s still the case that often people do act altruistically in ways that are hard to understand from a rational-choice perspective. People make anonymous donations, stand by loved ones for years while they fight fatal diseases, and toil at services that few see or appreciate.
In fact, some sociologists argue that living peacefully and constructively in society requires constant acts of generosity on everyone’s part. If everyone actually tried to get away with whatever they could, doing exactly what they pleased just so long as the reward eclipsed whatever punishment they might face, society would fall apart. Think about what it would be like if every storekeeper had to assume that every single customer would steal if given any opportunity, or if no one ever let anyone else merge into a crowded lane on the freeway. No police force could hold a society together if all its members were determined to act for their personal gain.
So why don’t they? According to Durkheim, it’s norms and shared values that hold society together. Society is not just about jumping on the back of the next guy so you can get higher; it’s about cooperating to achieve goals together — and joining together to celebrate those achievements. People internalize the norms of society so deeply that they regularly act in ways that would seem to be contrary to any selfish motives . . . and fortunately, this leads to a working society that benefits everyone. To understand the decisions a person makes, you have to understand the society they come from.
This question is specifically relevant to people who want to design an effective government: What can you count on people to do for the good of society, and what do you need to force people to do? I cover that topic in more detail in Chapter 13.