Beyond Rational Choice TheoryAuthor(s): Raymond BoudonSource: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 29 (2003), pp. 1-21Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036958Accessed: 26/11/2010 20:28

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Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2003. 29:1-21 doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100213

Copyright © 2003 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved First published online as a Review in Advance on June 4, 2003

BEYOND RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

Raymond Boudon University of Paris-Sorbonne, Universite Paris IV, ISHA, 96 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France; email: rboudon@noos.fr

Key Words beliefs, cognitivism, epistemology, methodological individualism, values

U Abstract Skepticism toward sociology has grown over recent years. The atten- tion granted to rational choice theory (RCT) is, to a large extent, a reaction against this situation. Without doubt, RCT is a productive instrument, but it fails signally in explaining positive nontrivial beliefs as well as normative nonconsequential beliefs. RCT's failures are due to its move to use too narrow a definition of rationality. A model can be developed that combines the advantages of the RCT (mainly providing self-sufficient explanations), without falling victim to its shortcomings. This model is implicitly used in classical and modem sociological works that are considered to be illuminating and valid.

RCT: A SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS OF SOCIOLOGY?

It is evident that sociology has not achieved triumphs comparable to those of the several older and more heavily supported sciences. A variety of in- terpretations have been offered to explain the difference-most frequently, that the growth of knowledge in the science of sociology is more random than cumulative. The true situation appears to be that in some parts of the discipline.. .there has in fact taken place a slow but accelerating accumula- tion of organized and tested knowledge. In some other fields the expansion of the volume of literature has not appeared to have had this property. Critics have attributed the slow pace to a variety of factors.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The evaluation is fair. Some evaluators are more critical: Horowitz (1994) evokes the "decomposition of sociology," whereas Dahrendorf (1995) wonders whether social science is withering away. To many sociologists the state of the discipline is unsatisfactory.

One reason for the peculiar state of sociology is that, while its main objective might be to explain puzzling phenomena, just like other scientific disciplines, in fact it follows other directions. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Boudon & Cherkaoui 1999, Boudon 2001b), sociology has always pursued cameral, critical,

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and expressive directions as well as its cognitive approach. While some sociological works aim at explaining social phenomena, others produce data for the benefit of public policy, critical analyses of society for the benefit of social movements, or emotional descriptions of society in the spirit of realistic novels or movies for the benefit of the general public.

Another source of this particularity is that the notion of theory has a much more uncertain meaning in sociology than it does in the other sciences. Thus, labeling theory, a theory often referred to over recent decades, does nothing more than label familiar phenomena. Much is written about social capital theory today. But social capital is just a word for well-known mechanisms. As Alejandro Portes (1998) writes, "Current enthusiasm for the concept of social capital.. .is not likely to abate soon (...) However, .. .the set of processes encompassed by the concept are not new and have been studied under other labels in the past. Calling them social capital is, to a large extent, just a means of presenting them in a more appealing conceptual garb."

So, explanation is not always the main aim that sociologists seem to pursue, and they sometimes give the impression of taking the idea of explanation down a particular path that has nothing to do with the meaning of the word in other, more solidly established sciences.

I see the attention currently granted to rational choice theory (RCT) as being, to a large extent, a reaction against this state of affairs.

RATIONAL ACTION IS ITS OWN EXPLANATION

The motivations of RCT contenders are reminiscent of the discussions about physics that took place in the Vienna Circle in the early twentieth century. Physical theories, Carnap contended, include obscure notions (such as force); a truly valid theory should be able to eliminate such notions. Once expressed in an entirely explicit fashion, it should have the property of constituting, in principle, a set of uncontroversial statements.

Rational Choice theorists, along the same line of argument, contend that ex- plaining a phenomenon means making it the consequence of a set of statements that should all be easily acceptable. They assume that a good sociological theory is one that interprets any social phenomenon as the outcome of rational individ- ual actions. As Hollis (1977) puts it, "rational action is its own explanation." To Coleman (1986, p. 1), "Rational actions of individuals have a unique attractiveness as the basis for social theory. If an institution or a social process can be accounted for in terms of the rational actions of individuals, then and only then can we say that it has been 'explained.' The very concept of rational action is a conception of action that is 'understandable,' action that we need ask no more questions about." To Becker (1996), "The extension of the utility-maximizing approach to include endogenous preferences is remarkably useful in unifying a wide class of behavior, including habitual, social and political behavior. I do not believe that any alternative approach-be it founded on 'cultural,' 'biological,' or 'psychological'

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forces--comes close to providing comparable insights and explanatory power." Briefly, as soon as a social phenomenon can be explained as the outcome of ra- tional individual actions, the explanation invites no further question: It contains no black boxes. By contrast, irrational explanations necessarily introduce various types of forces that raise even further questions as to whether they are real and, if so, which is their nature.

As Becker rightly maintains, a theory appears less convincing as soon as it evokes psychological forces (as when cognitive psychologists explain that peo- ple tend to give a wrong answer to a statistical problem because of the existence of some "cognitive bias"), biological forces [as when sociobiologists, e.g., Ruse (1993), claim that moral feelings are an effect of biological evolution], or cultural forces (as when sociologists claim that a given collective belief is the product of socialization). In contrast to rational explanations, all these explanations raise further questions: They include black boxes. Moreover, these explanations leave the feeling that it is easy to elicit data that are incompatible and/or that the further questions they raise have little chance of ever being answered. Thus, once we have explained that most Romans in the early Roman Empire believed in the traditional Roman polytheistic religion because they had been socialized to it, we are con- fronted with the question as to why Roman civil servants and centurions, although they too had been socialized to the old polytheistic religion, tended rather to be attracted by monotheistic religions such as the Mithra cult and then Christianity [Weber 1988 (1922)]. Moreover, the notion of socialization generates a black box that seems hard to open: Nobody has yet been able to discover the mechanisms behind socialization in the way, say, that the mechanisms behind digestion have been explored and disentangled. I am not saying that socialization is a worthless notion, nor that there are no such things as socialization effects, but merely that the notion is descriptive rather than explanatory. It identifies and christens the various correlations that can be observed between the way people have been raised and educated and their beliefs and behavior; it does not explain them.

THE SYSTEM OF AXIOMS DEFINING RCT

RCT can be described by a set of postulates. I will present them in a general way in order to transcend the variants of the theory. The first postulate, P1, states that any social phenomenon is the effect of individual decisions, actions, attitudes, etc., (individualism). A second postulate, P2, states that, in principle at least, an action can be understood (understanding). As some actions can be understood without being rational, a third postulate, P3, states that any action is caused by reasons in the mind of individuals (rationality). A fourth postulate, P4, assumes that these reasons derive from consideration by the actor of the consequences of his or her actions as he or she sees them (consequentialism, instrumentalism). A fifth postulate, P5, states that actors are concerned mainly with the consequences to themselves of their own action (egoism). A sixth postulate, P6, maintains that actors are able to distinguish the costs and benefits of alternative lines of action and

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that they choose the line of action with the most favorable balance (maximization, optimization).

The Importance of RCT

That RCT is the adequate framework of many successful explanations is incon- trovertible. Why did the cold war last so many decades and why did it come to a sudden conclusion? Why did the Soviet Union disappear? Why did the Soviet Empire collapse suddenly in the early 1990s and not 20 years before or after? Such general causes as low economic efficiency and the violation of human rights cannot explain why it collapsed when it did or why it collapsed so abruptly. RCT can help in answering these questions. The Western World and the Soviet Union became involved in an arms race shortly after the end of World War II. Now, an arms race presents a "prisoner's dilemma" (PD) structure: If I (the U.S. government) do not increase my military potential while the other party (the government of the U.S.S.R.) does, I run a deadly risk. Thus, I have to increase military spending, even though, as a government, I would prefer to spend less money on weapons and more on, say, schools, hospitals, or welfare because these would be more appreciated by the voters. In this situation, increasing one's arsenal is a dominant strategy, al- though its outcome is not optimal. The United States and the Soviet Union played this game for decades and accumulated so many nuclear weapons that each could destroy the planet several times over. This "foolish" outcome was the product of "rational" strategies. The two superactors, the two governments, played their dominant strategy and could not do any better than marginally reducing their ar- senals through negotiations. The game stopped when the PD structure that had characterized the decades-long interaction between the two powers was suddenly destroyed. It was destroyed by the threat developed by then U.S. President Reagan of reaching a new threshold in the arms race by developing the SDI project, the so- called Star Wars. The initiative contained a certain measure of bluff. Technically, the project was nowhere near ripe. Even today, the objective of devising defensive missiles to intercept any missile launched against territories protected by the SDI appears problematic at best. Economically, the project was so expensive that the Soviet government saw that there was no way to follow without generating serious internal economic problems. Hence, it did not follow and by not so doing, lost its status of superpower, which had been uniquely grounded in its military strength. Of course, there are other causes underlying the collapse of the Soviet Union, but a fundamental one is that the PD game that had hitherto characterized relations between the two superpowers was suddenly disrupted by Reagan's move. Here, an RCT approach helps identify one of the main causes of a major macroscopic historical phenomenon. It provides an explanation as to why Gorbachev moved in a new direction that would be fatal to the U.S.S.R., and why the U.S.S.R. col- lapsed at precisely that point in time. In this case, we get an explanation without black boxes as to why the "stupid" arms race was conducted, and why it sud- denly stopped at a given point in time, leaving one of the protagonists in defeat.

BEYOND RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

Although the RCT game-theoretical approach uses a very simple representation of the actors, it provides a convincing explanation. The explanation works because the RCT axioms, though reductionist, are not unrealistic here: It is true that any government has to be "egoist," i.e., has to take care of its own national interests.

Consider as another example Tocqueville's explanation of the stagnation of French agriculture at the end of the eighteenth century [Tocqueville 1986 (1856)]. The "administrative centralization" characteristic of eighteenth century France is the cause of the fact that there are many positions of civil servants available (statement al) in France and that they are more prestigious than in England (a2); the causes expressed by statements al and a2 provoke a rate of landlord absenteeism much larger than in England (statement b); landlord absenteeism is the cause of a low rate of innovation (c); the low rate of innovation is the cause of the stagnation (d) (Figure 1).

To eliminate all black boxes from this explanation, one has to explain further why al and a2 are causes of b, why b is the cause of c, and why c is the cause of d. The answer takes the form of individualistic statements, namely, statements explaining why the ideal-typical individuals belonging to relevant categories be- haved the way they did. Why are al and a2 the causes of b? Because (al) landlords see that they can easily buy a position of civil servant and that (a2), by so doing, they increase their power, prestige, and possibly income. In England, there are fewer civil servants, and their positions are less accessible or rewarding, whereas the gentleman-farmer is offered many opportunities for interesting social rewards through local political life. Moreover, a good strategy for gentlemen farmers with

al

al

Sb 3 c y d

a2a2

a2

Figure 1 Tocqueville's explanation of the stagnation of French agriculture at the end of the eighteenth century, al (many positions of civil servants are available in France) and a2 (being a civil servant is more prestigious in France than in England) cause b (the rate of landlord absenteeism); b causes c (a low rate of innovation); c is the cause of d (agricultural stagnation). al (buying a position as a civil servant is easy) and a2 (increasing power and prestige) describes the French landlords' reasons for leaving their land; ,f (landowners rent their land to farmers); y (reasons for farmers to cultivate the land in a noninnovative fashion).

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national political ambitions to get elected to Westminster is to appear active and innovative locally. Thus, French landlords have reasons (described by al and a2) to leave their land and serve the king that their English counterparts do not have to the same degree. Such statements deal with the question as to why the relevant category of landlords behaved the way they did. Why is b the cause of c? Why is landlord absenteeism inimmical to innovation? Because landowners rent their land to farmers (f6). Why is c the cause of d? Why do farmers not innovate? Because they do not have the capacity to do so. Hence, they have reasons (y) to cultivate the land in a noninnovative fashion. The theory thus explains why the relevant social categories, landlords and farmers, behaved the way they did. Tocqueville's theory gives the impression of being final; first, because its empirical statements appear congruent with observational data, and second, because its statements (those de- scribed by the Greek letters) on the reasons why farmers, landlords, etc., behaved the way they did are evident, not in the logical but in the psychological sense.

It would be easy to list many modem works that owe their scientific value to the fact that they use this RCT model. The works of economists and sociologists such as Olson (1965), Oberschall (1973, 1994), Coleman (1990), Kuran (1995), Hardin (1995), among others, come to mind, as well as historians such as Root (1994) or political scientists such as Rothstein (2001). Without question, RCT has indeed produced a substantial number of genuinely scientific contributions in the past or more recently.

RCT: A POWERFUL OR A GENERAL THEORY?

Although RCT is a powerful theory, it appears powerless when confronted with many phenomena. An impressive list can be compiled of all the familiar phenomena it is unable to explain. This combination of success and failure is worth stressing inasmuch as the social sciences community seems to be divided into two parties: those who treat RCT as "a new Gospel" (Hoffman 2000) and those who do not believe in this gospel. Furthermore, this mixture of success and failure raises the important question as to its causes.

The Voting Paradox

The effect of a single vote on turnout for any election is so small, claims RCT, that rational actors should actually refrain from voting: The costs of voting are always higher than the benefits. As one of these voters, I should prefer resting, walking, writing an article, or operating my vacuum cleaner to voting. Nevertheless, like many people, I vote.

Many "solutions" to this paradox have been proposed, several of them even brilliant, yet they fail to be really convincing. People like to vote, says a theory; people would feel such strong regret if their ballot would have made the difference that they vote even though they know that the probability of this event occurring is infinitesimally small, says another (Ferejohn & Fiorina 1974). IfI do not vote, I run

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the risk of losing my reputation (Overbye 1995). Sometimes, RCT is made more flexible by the notion of "cognitive frames." Thus, Quattrone & Tversky (1987) propose considering that voters vote because they see their motivation to vote as a sign that their party is going to win, in the same way that the Calvinists, according to Weber, are success-oriented because they think this attitude is a sign that they are among the elected. Such a "frame" appears, however, not only as ad hoc, but as introducing a black box. Schuessler (2000) starts from the idea that the voter has an expressive rather than an instrumental interest in voting.

None of these "solutions" has been widely accepted. Some, like Ferejohn's and Fiorina's, display a high intellectual virtuosity. However, they have not eliminated the "paradox."

Other Paradoxes

Other classical "paradoxes" beside voting can be mentioned. Allais' "paradoxes" show that, when they are proposed to bet in some types of lotteries, people do not make choices in conformity with the principle of maximizing expected utility (Allais & Hagen 1979, Hagen 1995). Frey (1997) has shown that people will occasionally accept some disagreement more easily if there is no compensation offered than when there is. As a case in point, a study conducted in Switzerland and Germany showed that people accept the presence of nuclear waste on their city's land more easily when they are not offered compensation than when they are.

Psychologists have devised many other experiments, for example, the classical "ultimatum game" (Wilson 1993, pp. 62-63; Hoffman & Spitzer 1985), that resist the RCT. Sociology also has produced many observations that can be read as challenges to the RCT. Thus, the negative reaction of social subjects against some given state of affairs has often nothing to do with the costs they are exposed to by this particular state of affairs. On the other hand, actions can frequently be observed where the benefit to the actor is zero or even negative. In White Collar, C.W. Mills (1951) identified what could be called the "overreaction paradox." He describes women clerks working in a firm where they all sit in a large room doing the same tasks, at the same kind of desk, in the same work environment. Violent conflicts frequently break out over minor issues such as being seated closer to a source of heat or light. An outside observer would normally consider such conflicts as irrational because he or she would implicitly use RCT: Why such a violent reaction? As the behavior of the women would appear to be strange in terms of this model, he or she would turn to an irrational interpretation: childish behavior. By so doing, he or she would be confessing that RCT cannot easily explain the overreaction paradox observed by Mills.

Many observations would lead to the same conclusion: They can be inter- preted satisfactorily in neither an irrational nor an RCT fashion. To mention just a few of them, corruption in "normal" conditions-by which I mean the condi- tions prevailing in most Western countries-is invisible to the common man or

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woman; he or she does not see or feel its effects. He or she nevertheless con- siders corruption to be unacceptable. Plagiarism is, in most instances, without consequences. Indeed, in some circumstances it may even serve the interests of the person being plagiarized since it attracts public attention. It is looked on with approbrium, however. On some issues like the death penalty, I can have strong opinions even though the likelihood that I might be personally affected is zero. In other words, in many circumstances, people are guided by considerations that have nothing to do with their own interests, nor with the consequences of their actions or reactions.

On the whole, psychologists, sociologists, and economists have produced a huge number of observations which cannot easily be explained within the RCT frame. This situation raises two questions. Why does the RCT fail so often? Is there a model that would satisfy the scientific ambition underlying RCT, namely trying to provide explanations without black boxes, and at the same time get rid of its defects?

The Sources of the Weaknesses of the RCT

It is not very hard to determine the reasons for RCT's failures. The social phe- nomena that RCT is incapable of accounting for share many features in common. Three types of phenomena that slip RCT's jurisdiction can be identified.

The first type includes phenomena characterized by the fact that actors base their choices on noncommonplace beliefs. All behavior involves beliefs. To maximize my chances of survival, in accordance with RCT, I will look both ways before crossing the street. This behavior is dictated by a belief: I believe that if I don't look both ways I'm taking a serious chance. Here, the belief involved is commonplace, not worth the analyst's while to look at more closely. To account for other items of behavior, however, it is crucial to explain the beliefs upon which they rest. Now, RCT has nothing to tell us about beliefs, a weakness that is one of the main reasons for its failures.

We can postulate that an actor holds a given belief because that belief is a conse- quence of a theory he or she endorses. We can postulate furthermore that endorsing the theory is a rational act. But here the rationality is cognitive, not instrumental: It consists of preferring the theory that allows one to account for given phenomena in the most satisfying possible way (in accordance with certain criteria). The actor endorses a theory because he or she believes that the theory is true. Conversely, it is precisely because RCT reduces rationality to instrumental rationality that it runs into trouble when confronted with a whole variety of paradoxes.

Some sociologists have sought to reduce cognitive rationality to instrumental reality. Radnitzky (1987) proposes that endorsing a scientific theory results from a cost-benefit analysis. A scientist stops believing in a theory, writes Radnitzky, as soon as the objections raised against it make defending it too "costly." It is indeed difficult to explain why a boat hull disappears from the horizon before the mast, why the moon takes the shape of a crescent, why a navigator who maintains

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constant direction returns to his starting point if we accept the theory that the earth is flat. But what does it get us to replace the word difficult with the word costly? Defending a given theory is more costly precisely because it is more difficult. We must then explain why this is so; and from instrumental rationality we come back to cognitive rationality.

RCT is powerless before a second category of phenomena: those characterized by the fact that actors are following nonconsequentialist prescriptive beliefs. RCT is comfortable with prescriptive beliefs as long as they are consequentialist. RCT has no trouble explaining, for example, why most people believe that traffic lights are a good thing: Despite the inconvenience they represent to me, I accept them because they have consequences that I judge beneficial. Here, RCT effectively accounts for both the belief and the attitudes and behavior inspired by that be- lief. But RCT is mute when it comes to normative beliefs that cannot readily be explained in consequentialist terms (Boudon 2001a). The subject in the classical socio-psychological experiment "ultimatum game" acts against his or her own in- terest. The voter votes, even though that vote will have virtually no effect on the election result. The citizen vehemently disapproves of corruption even though not affected personally. The plagiarist gives rise to a feeling of disdain, even when no one is hurt and the plagiarized writer's renown is actually enhanced. We point an accusing finger at imposters, though their machinations create problems for no one but themselves.

RCT is powerless before a third category of phenomena, that involving behavior by individuals whom we cannot in any sensible way assume to be dictated by self-interest. Regardless of whether Sophocles' Antigone is being acted in Paris, Beijing, or Algiers, the viewer of the tragedy unhesitatingly condemns Creon and supports Antigone. The reason RCT cannot explain this universal reaction is simple: The spectators' interests are in no way affected by the matter before them. We therefore cannot explain that reaction by any possible consequences on them personally; nor by any consequences at all because there are no such consequences. The spectator is not directly involved in the fate of Thebes; that fate belongs in the past, and no one has any control over it anymore. Thus the consequentialism and self-interest postulates are disqualified ipso facto.

Sociologists often find themselves confronted with this kind of phenomenon, inasmuch as the social actors are regularly called upon to evaluate situations in which they are not personally implicated at all. Most people are not personally implicated in the death penalty; it "touches" neither them, their families, or friends. This hardly means they cannot have a strong opinion on the issue. How can a set of postulates that assumes them to be self-interested account for their reactions in situations where their interests are not at stake and there is no chance that they ever will be? These remarks lead to a crucial conclusion for the social sciences as a whole; namely, RCT has little if anything to tell us about opinion phenomena, which are a major social force and hence a crucial subject for sociologists.

In sum, RCT is disarmed when it comes to (a) phenomena involving non- commonplace beliefs, (b) phenomena involving nonconsequentialist prescriptive

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beliefs, and (c) phenomena that bring into play reactions that do not, by the very nature of things, spring from any consideration based on self-interest.

OPENING THE RCT AXIOMS

These considerations suggest that axioms P4, P5, and P6 are welcome in some cases but not in all. Reciprocally, the set of axioms P1, P2, and P3 appear to be more general than the set P1 to P6. Now, P1 defines what is usually called methodologi- cal individualism (MI), whereas the set of postulates made up of P1 and P2 defines interpretive sociology (in Weber's sense). As to the set P1 to P3, it defines a version of interpretive sociology where actions are supposed to be rational in the sense that they are grounded on reasons in the actor's mind. I identify the paradigm defined by postulates P1 to P3 as the cognitivist theory of action (CTA). It assumes that any col- lective phenomenon is the effect of individual human actions (individualism); that, in principle, provided the observer has sufficient information, the action of an ob- served actor is always understandable (understanding); that the causes of the actor's action are the reasons for him or her to undertake it (rationality) (Boudon 1996).

RCT's failures are due to its move to reduce all rationality to the instrumental variety and neglect cognitive rationality as it applies not only to descriptive but also to prescriptive problems (axiological rationality). Conversely, it is essential for sociology as a discipline to be aware that many classical and modem sociological studies owe their explanatory efficacy to the use of a cognitive version of MI, as opposed to the instrumental one, primarily represented by RCT.

A BROADER NOTION OF RATIONALITY

CTA has the main advantage of RCT (i.e., offering explanations without black boxes), but not its disadvantages, thanks to a broader notion of rationality that is commonly accepted not only by philosophers but also by prominent social scientists, such as Adam Smith indirectly or Max Weber directly.

I do not see why sociologists should not pay attention to distinctions repeat- edly recognized by philosophers as well as by classical sociologists. Thus, Rescher (1995, p. 26) states, "rationality is in its very nature teleological and ends-oriented," making immediately clear that "teleological" should not be made synonymous with "instrumental" or "consequential." He goes on, "Cognitive rationality is concerned with achieving true beliefs. Evaluative rationality is concerned with making correct evaluation. Practical rationality is concerned with the effective pursuit of appro- priate objectives." All these forms of rationality are goal-oriented, but the nature of the goals can be diverse.

By creating his notion of "axiological rationality" or "evaluative rationality" (Wertrationalitiit) as complementary to, but essentially different from "instru- mental rationality" (Zweckrationalitdt), Max Weber clearly supported the the- sis that rationality can be noninstrumental, in other words, that rationality is a broader concept than instrumental rationality and a fortiori than the special form of instrumental rationality (P1 to P6) postulated by RCT. As to Adam Smith's notion

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of the "impartial spectator," it invites us to pay attention to the fact that on many issues people may be unconcerned about their own interests, but can nevertheless have strong opinions on these very same issues. Individual opinions can also be inspired by impersonal reasons.

Theorists have recognized that instrumental rationality is only one form of rationality. Moreover, many classical and modern compelling sociological analyses implicitly (as with Tocqueville) or explicitly (as with Weber) use the generalized conception of rationality that characterizes the CTA model. A few examples will illustrate this point.

COGNITIVE RATIONALITY

Belief in Constructivism in France

An example, again taken from Tocqueville [1986 (1856)], illustrates how the rea- sons for actors' beliefs and behavior are currently "cognitive." He wondered why French intellectuals on the eve of the Revolution firmly believed in the idea of Reason with a capital R, and why that notion had spread like wildfire among the public. It was an enigmatic phenomenon, not to be seen at the time in Britain, the United States, or the German states. And one with enormous macroscopic consequences.

Tocqueville's explanation consists in showing that Frenchmen at the end of the eighteenth century had strong reasons to believe in Reason. In France at that time, many traditional institutions seemed illegitimate. One was the idea that the nobility was superior to the third estate. Nobles did not participate either in local political affairs or economic life; rather they spent their time at Versailles. Those who remained in the country held on all the more tightly to their privileges the poorer they were. This explains why they were given the name of an unsightly little bird of prey, the hobereau, a metaphor that spread quickly because it was perceived to be so fitting. The following equation was established in many individual minds: Tradition = Dysfunction = Illegitimacy; and, by opposition, Reason = Progress = Legitimacy. It was because this line of argument was latent in people's minds that the call by the philosophes to construct a society founded on Reason enjoyed such immediate success.

The English, on the other hand, had good reasons not to believe in those ideas. In England, the nobles played a crucial role: They ran local social, political, and economic life. The superiority attributed to them in customary thinking and by English institutions was perceived as functional and therefore legitimate. In general, traditional English institutions were not perceived as dysfunctional.

Can False Beliefs Be Rational?

An objection to CTA is that action is often grounded on false ideas and therefore it cannot be held to be rational. But to counter this received idea, false beliefs can be grounded on strong reasons, and in that sense are rational, as familiar examples show.

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Pareto has said, with reason, that the history of science is the graveyard of all the false ideas that once were endorsed under the authority of scientists. In other words, science produces false ideas beside true ones. Now, nobody would accept the notion that these false ideas are endorsed by scientists under the effect of irrational causes, because their brains would have to have been wired in an inadequate fashion, or because their minds would have to have been obscured by inadequate "cognitive biases," "frames," "habitus," by class interests or by affective causes-in other words, by the "biological," "psychological," or "cultural forces" evoked by Becker (1996). Scientists believe in statements that often turn out to be false because they have strong reasons for believing in them, given the cognitive context.

The believers in phlogiston, in ether, or in the many other entities and mecha- nisms that now appear purely imaginary to us had in their day, given the cognitive context, strong reasons to believe in them. It was not immediately recognized as important that when a piece of oxide of mercury is heated under an empty bell- glass, the drop of water that appears on the bell's wall should be taken into account: That this drop of water appears regularly escaped immediate attention, nor was it clearly perceived that this result contradicts phlogiston theory.

Why should the false beliefs produced by ordinary knowledge not be explained in the same fashion as false scientific statements, namely based in the minds of the social subjects on reasons that they perceive to be strong, given the cognitive context in which they move?

I am not saying that false beliefs should always be explained in this fashion. Even scientists can hold false beliefs through passion or other irrational causes. What I am saying is that belief in false ideas can be caused by reasons in the mind of the actors, and that they are often caused by reasons in situations of interest to sociologists. Even though these reasons appear false to us, they may be perceived to be right and strong by the actors themselves. To explain that what they perceive as right is wrong, we do not have to assume that their minds are obscured by some hypothetical mechanisms of the kind Marx ("false consciousness"), Freud ("the unconscious"), L6vy-Bruhl (the mentalite primitive), and their many heirs imagined, nor by the more prosaic "frames" evoked by RCT. In most cases, expla- nations are more acceptable if we make the assumption that, given the cognitive context in which they move, actors have strong reasons for believing in false ideas.

I have produced elsewhere several examples showing that the rational explana- tion of beliefs that we consider normal in the case of false scientific beliefs can also be applied to ordinary knowledge. I have explored intensively instances of belief in magic (Boudon 1998-2000) and false beliefs observed by cognitive psychologists (Boudon 1996).

Here I limit myself to one example (inspired from Kahneman & Tversky, 1973) from the second category. When psychiatrists are asked whether depression is a cause of attempted suicide, they agree. When asked why, they answer that they have frequently observed patients with both features: Many of their patients appeared to be depressed and they have attempted suicide. Of course, the answer indicates that the psychiatrists are using one piece of information in the contingency table

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TABLE 1 A causal presumption can be derived from the single piece of information a if a is much larger than exgli

Suicide attempted Suicide not attempted Total

Depression symptoms a b e = a + b No depression symptoms c d f= c + d

Total g=a+c h=b+d i=a+b+c+d

above (Table 1): Their argument runs, "a is high, hence depression is a cause of attempted suicide."

Now, any freshman in statistics would know that such an argument is wrong: To conclude that there is a correlation between depression and suicide attempts, one has to consider not one, but four pieces of information, not only a, but the difference a/e-c/f.

The psychiatrists' answer shows that statistical intuition seems to follow rules that have nothing to do with the valid rules of statistical inference. But it does not prove that we should assume, in a L6vy-bruhlian fashion, that the physicians' brains are ill-wired. The physicians may very well have strong reasons for believing what they do. Their answers may even suggest that statistical intuition is less deficient than it seems. Suppose, for instance, that e in the table below equals 20%, in other words that 20% of the patients of the physicians have depression symptoms, and that g also equals 20% (20% of the patients have attempted suicide). Admittedly, higher figures would be unrealistic. With these assumptions, in the case where the percentage a of people presenting the two characters is greater than 4, the two variables would be correlated, and thus causality could plausibly be presumed. A physician who has seen, say, 10 people out of 100 presenting with the two characters would have good reason to believe in the existence of a causal relationship between the two features.

In this example, the belief of the physicians is not really false. In other instances, the beliefs produced by cognitive psychology appear to be unambiguously false. In most cases, however, I found that these beliefs could be explained as being grounded in reasons perceived by the subjects as strong, which the observer can easily understand.

Obviously, these reasons are not of the "benefit minus cost" type. They are rather of the cognitive type. The aim pursued by the actor is not to maximize utility, but rather credibility, to determine whether something is likely, true, etc. In addition to its instrumental dimension, therefore, rationality has a cognitive dimension.

CAN RELIGIOUS BELIEFS BE ANALYZED AS RATIONAL?

Weber defined his "Verstehende sociology" as founded on MI: "Interpretive so- ciology (as I conceive it) considers the isolated individual and his activity as its basic unit, I would say its 'atom'" (Weber 1922). In his view, sociology, like any

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science, has to bring the macroscopic phenomena it is interested in down to their microscopic causes. He believed that the cause of an actor's actions and beliefs consists in the meaning they had for that actor. And he rejected the idea of reducing rationality to instrumental rationality. His whole sociology of religion is founded on the methodological principle that the causes of religious beliefs and of the ac- tions inspired by these beliefs reside in the meaning attributed to them by their social subjects, and more exactly, that the reasons those subjects had for adher- ing to those beliefs could not be reduced to RCT reasons. In other words, whereas Weber's "interpretive sociology" is, strictly speaking, defined by postulates P1-P2, in practice, Weber uses the set of postulates P1 to P3: the CTA. It excludes the sup- plementary postulates P4-P6 that define RCT. On this point Weber's theoretical texts are perfectly consistent with his empirical analyses.

Why were functionaries, military personnel, and politicians in Ancient Rome and modem Prussia attracted to such cults as Mithraism and Freemasonry, each characterized by a vision of disembodied transcendence subject to superior laws and a conception of the community of the faithful as a group to be organized hier- archically through initiation rituals? Because the articles of faith in such religions were consistent with the social and political philosophy of these social categories. Their members believed that a social system could function only if under the con- trol of a legitimate central authority and that that authority must be moved by impersonal rules. Their vision was of a functional, hierarchically organized soci- ety, and that hierarchy had to be founded on abilities and skills to be determined in accordance with formalized procedures--as was the case in the Roman and Prussian states. Taken together, these principles for the political organization of a "bureaucratic" state were, in their eyes, the reflection of a valid political phi- losophy. And they perceived the initiation rituals of Mithraism, in the case of the Roman officers and civil servants, or Freemasonry, in the case of Prussian civil servants, as expressing those same principles in a metaphysical-religious mode.

To cite another example, Weber explained that peasants had difficulty accepting monotheism because the uncertainty characteristic of natural phenomena did not seem to them to be at all compatible with the idea that the order of things could be subject to a single will, a notion that in and of itself implied a minimal degree of coherence and predictability.

Axiological Rationality

Weber's "axiological rationality" is often understood as synonymous with "value conformity." I would propose rather that the expression identifies the case where prescriptive beliefs are grounded in the mind of social actors on systems of rea- sons perceived by them as strong, in exactly the same way as descriptive beliefs (Boudon 2001a). This important intuition contained in Weber's notion (though implicitly rather than explicitly) was apparently already present in Adam Smith's mind.

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An Illustration from Adam Smith

Although it is recognized that Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments does not rest on RCT, it is sometimes held that his better-known work on the Wealth of Nations does. The following example shows, however, that this is not the case. Even in this book, which had a tremendous influence on economic theory, Smith does not use RCT, but rather the cognitive version of MI: CTA.

Why, asks Smith, do we (i.e., eighteenth century Englishmen) consider it normal that soldiers are paid less than miners? Smith's methodology in his answer could be applied to many similar questions today: Why do we feel it fair that such and such occupation is paid more or less than another [Smith 1976 (1776), book 1, chapter 10]? His answer is as follows:

(a) A salary is the retribution of a contribution. (b) To equal contributions should correspond equal retributions. (c) Several components enter into the value of a contribution: the investment required to produce a given type of competence, the risks involved in the realization of the contribution, etc. (d) The investment time is comparable in the case of the miner and of the soldier. It takes about as much time and effort to train a soldier as to produce a miner. The two jobs are characterized by similar risks. Both include the risk of death. (e) Nonetheless, there are important differences between the two types of jobs. (f) The soldier serves a central function in society. This function preserves the identity and the very existence of the nation. The miner fulfills an economic activity among others. He is not more central to the society than, say, the textile worker. (g) Consequently, the death of the two men has a different social meaning. The death of the miner will be identified as an accident, the death of the soldier on the battlefield as a sacrifice. (h) Because of this difference in the social meaning of their respective activities, the soldier will be entitled to symbolic rewards, prestige, symbolic distinctions, including funeral honors in case of death on the battlefield. (i) The miner is not entitled to the same symbolic rewards. (j) As the contribution of the two categories in terms notably of risk and investment is the same, the equilibrium between contribution and retribution can only be restored by making the salary of the mineworkers higher. (k) This system of reasons is responsible for our feeling that the miner should be paid a higher wage than the soldier.

First, Smith's analysis does not use RCT. People do not believe what they believe because this would maximize some difference between benefits and costs. They have strong reasons for believing what they believe, but these reasons are not of the cost-benefit type. They are not even of the consequential type. At no point in the argument are the consequences that would eventually result from the miners not being paid more than the soldiers evoked. Smith's argument takes rather the form of a deduction from principles. People have the feeling that it is fair to pay higher salaries to miners than soldiers because the feeling is grounded on strong reasons derived from strong principles, claims Smith. He does not say that these reasons are explicitly present in everyone's head, but clearly assumes that they are in an intuitive fashion responsible for their beliefs. If miners were not paid more than soldiers this would perhaps generate consequences (a strike by miners, say);

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but these eventual consequences are not the reason why most people think the miners should be paid more; people do not believe in this statement out of fear of these eventual consequences.

Weber probably had such cases in mind when he introduced his distinction between "instrumental" and "axiological" rationality.

A contemporary theorist of ethics proposes analyses of some of our moral sentiments that are similar to Smith's (Walzer 1983). Why, for instance, do we consider conscription to be a legitimate recruitment method for soldiers but not for miners, he asks? The answer again is that the function of the former is vital whereas that of the latter is not. If conscription were to be applied to miners, it could be applied to any and eventually to all kinds of occupations, hence it would lead to a regime incompatible with the principles of democracy. In the same fashion, it is readily accepted for soldiers to be used as garbage collectors in emergencies, although it would be considered illegitimate to use them for such tasks in normal situations. In all these examples, as in Smith's example, collective moral feelings are grounded on solid reasons, but not on reasons of the type considered in RCT.

I am not saying of course that a notion such as fairness cannot be affected by contextual parameters. Thus, it has been shown that in the ultimatum game the 50/50 proposal is more frequent in societies where cooperation with one's neigh- bors is essential to current economic activity than in societies where competition between neighbors prevails (Henrich et al. 2001). Such findings are not incompat- ible with a rational interpretation of moral beliefs. They rather show that a system of reasons is more easily evoked in one context than in another. In summary, whereas contextual variation in moral beliefs is generally interpreted as validating a cultural-irrational view of axiological feelings, the contextual-rational paradigm illustrated by the previous examples appears to be more satisfactory: offering self- sufficient explanations, i.e., explanations without black boxes.

The Validity of Reasons

Why does an actor consider a system of reasons to be good? Kant wrote that looking for general criteria of truth amounts to trying to milk a billy goat. We should recognize with Popper that there are no general criteria of truth, but also, against Popper's theory of science, that there are not even general criteria of falsity. A theory is considered false only from the moment when an alternative theory is found that is definitely better. Priestley had strong reasons for believing the phlogiston theory was true. It became difficult to follow him only after Lavoisier showed that all the phenomena that Priestley had explained in accordance with his phlogiston could also be explained without it and with his own theory. In other circumstances, the relative strength of alternative systems of reasons will correspond to other types of criteria. In other words, we hold a theory to be true or false because we have strong reasons of considering it as such, but there are no general criteria of the strength of a system of reasons. More generally, let us assume for a moment that we would have been able to identify the general criteria

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of truth or rationality, then the next question would be: On which principles do you ground the criteria, and so on ad infinitum.

To sum up, a system of reasons can be stronger or weaker than another and we can explain why; but it cannot be said to be strong or weak in an absolute sense. Like all evaluative notions, truth and rationality are comparative, not absolute notions. A theory is never true or false, but truer or falser than another, if I may say so. We consider it true from the moment when we find it hard to imagine a better theory. The criteria used to decide that one system of reasons is stronger than another are drawn from a huge reservoir and vary from one question to another.

Borrowing examples from the history of science has the advantage of clarifying the discussion about the criteria of rationality. But the conclusion to be drawn from the above example (that there are no general criteria of rationality) applies not only to scientific, but to ordinary beliefs as well. And they apply not only to descriptive, but also to prescriptive beliefs.

This latter point often meets some resistance because of a wrong interpretation of Hume's uncontroversial theorem that "no conclusion of the prescriptive type can be drawn from a set of statements of the descriptive type." But a prescriptive or normative conclusion can be derived from a set of descriptive statements that are all descriptive, except one, so that the real formulation of Hume's theorem should be ". . .a set of statements all of the descriptive type." I have developed this point more fully in Boudon (2003). It is an essential point since it shows that the gap between prescriptive and descriptive beliefs is not as wide as many people think. It gives a clear meaning to Weber's assertion that axiological rationality and instrumental rationality are currently combined in social action, though they are entirely distinct from one another. As implied by the CTA model, cognitive reasons ground prescriptive as well as descriptive beliefs in the mind of individuals.

CONCLUSION

I have tried to make some crucial points: that social action generally depends on beliefs; that as far as possible, beliefs, actions, and attitudes should be treated as rational, or more precisely, as the effect of reasons perceived by social actors as strong; and that reasons dealing with costs and benefits should not be given more attention than they deserve. Rationality is one thing, expected utility another.

Why should we introduce this rationality postulate? Because social actors try to act in congruence with strong reasons. This explains why their own behavior is normally meaningful to them. In some cases, the context demands that these reasons are of the "cost-benefit" type. In other cases, they are not: Even if we accept that the notions of cost and benefit are interpreted in the most extensive fashion, what are the costs and benefits to me of miners being better paid than soldiers if I have no chance of ever becoming either a soldier or a miner?

On the whole, to get a satisfactory theory of rationality, one has to accept the idea that rationality is not exclusively instrumental. In other words, the reasons motivating an actor do not necessarily belong to the instrumental type. In the cases

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of interest to sociologists, people's actions are understandable because they are moved by reasons. But these reasons can be of several types. Action can rest on beliefs or not; the beliefs can be commonplace or not; they can be descriptive or prescriptive. In all cases, the CTA model assumes that action has to be explained by its meaning to the actor; it supposes hence that it is meaningful to the actor, or, in other words, that it is grounded in the actor's eyes on a system of reasons that he or she perceives to be strong.

The CTA model is also more promising than the "program-based behavior" model (PBBM) proposed by evolutionary epistemologists, notably Vanberg (2002), for the latter model unavoidably generates black boxes. As the generalized ver- sion of RCT obtained by supposing that actors are guided by "frames" loses the main advantage of RCT itself (providing self-sufficient explanations), the PBBM generates further questions of the type "where does the program come from? Why do some actors endorse it while others do not?" Because the CTA model has an answer to such questions, it is capable of generating self-sufficient explanations.

Considering RCT to be a special case of MI has the advantage of allowing the main advantage of RCT (producing black-box-free explanations) to be extended to a much wider set of social phenomena. But I must stress again that, if the CTA is more general than RCT, it cannot be applied to all phenomena. Irrationality should be given its right place. Traditional and affective actions also exist. Moreover, all actions rest on the basis of instincts. I look to my right and left before crossing a street because I want to stay alive. Reason is the servant of passions, as Hume said. But passions need Reason: the magician's customers are motivated by the passion to survive, to see their crops grow; but nobody would consider that this passion in itself is an adequate explanation for their magical beliefs.

The theory of rationality that I have sketched raises some important questions that I will content myself with mentioning. Does the fact that behavior and beliefs are normally inspired by strong reasons, even though these reasons might be false, mean that any behavior or belief can be justified? Certainly not. Priestley believed in phlogiston; Lavoisier did not. The two had strong reasons for believing what they believed, and they both saw their reasons as valid. The latter was right, the former wrong, however. The strength of reasons is thus a function of the context. Today, our cognitive context is such that Priestley's reasons are now weak for us because we know that Lavoisier's reasons were stronger. But Lavoisier's reasons had to be thought up and publicized before there could be any conclusion that he was right. Then he became irreversibly right as opposed to Priestley. No relativism follows from the contextuality of reasons.

Just as with cognitive reasons, axiological reasons can become stronger or weaker over time, mainly because new reasons are expounded. When it was shown that the abolition of capital punishment could not be held responsible for any sig- nificant increase in crime rates, the argument "capital punishment is good because it is an effective threat against crime" became weaker. This provoked a change-an irreversible one-in our moral sensibility toward capital punishment. There are no mechanically applicable general criteria of the strength of the reasons on which either prescriptive or descriptive beliefs are grounded. Still, irreversible changes

BEYOND RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

in prescriptive as well as descriptive beliefs are frequently observed because in the normal course of events, a system of reasons R' eventually appeared to be better than the system R, as in the descriptive case of Lavoisier and Priestley or as in the prescriptive case of Montesquieu (who defended the idea that political power would be more efficient if it is not concentrated) and Bodin (who could not imagine that political power would be efficient without its being concentrated). Montesquieu's and Bodin's beliefs as to what a good political organization should be were grounded on reasons that the two of them perceived to be strong. Clearly, Montesquieu was right.

Finally, the "paradoxes" mentioned above can be easily solved. They have no RCT solution but do have an easy CTA solution: plagiarism and corruption provoke a negative reaction not because of their consequences, but because they are incompatible with systems of reasons that most people think of as strong. The same is true of the other paradoxes, to which it is unnecessary to come back in detail: People make their decisions because of a more or less conscious set of arguments that they feel strong reason to believe in. Thus, in the "ultimatum game," they pick the 50/50 solution because they wonder which solution is fair, and they do their best to define fairness in this case. They do not ask what is good for themselves. People reject corruption though its effect on them is neutral because they endorse a theory from which they conclude that it is unacceptable. In all these cases, they display teleological behavior: They want to reach a goal. But only in particular cases is the goal to maximize one's interests or the satisfaction of one's preferences; the goal may also be finding the true or fair answer to a question. Given these various goals, they are rational in the sense that they look for the best or at least for a satisfactory system of reasons capable of grounding their answer.

The reader may be puzzled by the fact that I have used many examples from classical sociology in this paper. By so doing I wanted to suggest a thesis that I can formulate but not demonstrate in a short space: that from the beginning of our discipline, the most solid sociological explanations implicitly use the CTA model or, when adequate, its restricted version: RCT.

The Annual Review of Sociology is online at http://soc.annualreviews.org

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