DISCIPLINE IDEAS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (DISS)

Prepared by: TAM GERALD P. CALZADO/Instructor for Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS) Grade 11
Eastern Samar State University, Borongan City 6800

RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

 A view that people behave as they do because they believe that performing their chosen actions has more benefits
than costs.
 That is, people make rational choices based on their goals and those choices govern their behavior.
 Some sociologists use rational choice theory to explain social change. According to them, social change occurs
because individuals have made rational choices.
 E.g. Suppose many people begin to conserve more energy, lowering thermostats and driving less. An explanation for
this social change is that individual people have decided that conserving energy will help them achieve their goals
(for example, save money and live more healthfully) and cause little inconvenience.
 Critics argue that people do not always act on the basis of cost-benefit analyses.
 ASSUMPTIONS
 Humans are purposive and goal oriented.
 Humans have sets of hierarchically ordered preferences or utilities.
 In choosing lines of behavior, humans make rational calculations with respect to:
- Utility of alternative lines of conduct with reference to the preference hierarchy
- Costs of each alternative in terms of utilities forgone
- Best way to maximize utility
 Emergent social phenomena –social structures, collective decisions, and collective behavior – are ultimately the
result of rational choices made by utility-maximizing individuals.
 Emergent social phenomena that arise from rational choices constitute a set of parameters for subsequent rational
choices of individuals in the sense that they determine:
- distribution of resources among individuals
- distribution of opportunities for various lines of behavior
- Distribution and nature of norms and obligations in a situation
 Attempts to explain all (conforming and deviant) social phenomena in terms of how self-interested individuals make
choices under the influence of their preferences. It treats social exchange as similar to economic exchange where all
parties try to maximize their advantage or gain, and to minimize their disadvantage or loss.
 BASIC PREMISES
1. Human beings base their behavior on rational calculations;
2. They act with rationality when making choices;
3. Their choices are aimed at optimization of their pleasure or profit.
 However, this cannot explain the existence of certain social phenomenon such as altruism (belief or practice of
disinterested and selfless concern for others’ well-being), reciprocity (exchange with others for mutual benefit,
especially privileges granted by one to another), and trust, and why individuals voluntarily join associations and
groups where collective and not individual benefits are pursued.
 STRENGTHS
- This theory gave rise to the Rational Comprehensive Model wherein this approach lays out logical and
deliberative framework for planning practice, including: a) identifying a particular problem, b) setting goals, c)
articulating aims and objectives, d) predicting and projecting outcomes, e) testing and f) implementation.
 CRITICISM
- It is naïve to assume a stable and widely accepted value to structure goal setting.
- It is difficult to have each person agree on common goals as each and every person perceives issues differently
and have different interests. Incorporating all this differences would pose a big challenge to the planners.
Moreover, not everyone can and should accept and adopt one form of universal values and beliefs.
 CONTRIBUTORS
 Gary Becker – early proponent of applying rational actor models; won Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (1992)
dealing with discrimination, crime and punishment, human capital, families and organ market.
 George Homans – proposed the Exchange Theory; approach rests on a behaviorist conception of the individual
actor motivated by rewards and punishments, contemporary RCT (Coleman 1990) simply argues that individuals act
as if they are rational, and that human rationality needs no further explanation. RCT is not concerned with how actors
define utility, or what particular objectives they seek to acquire; rather, the focus is simply on the fact that actions are
chosen to achieve such ends efficiently.
DISCIPLINE IDEAS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (DISS)
Prepared by: TAM GERALD P. CALZADO/Instructor for Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS) Grade 11
Eastern Samar State University, Borongan City 6800
 Adam Smith – Smith, who wrote in the 1700s, tried to make sense out of how people come to make choices,
especially economic ones. Basically, Smith wanted to know how an economy can work when everyone is basically
self-interested and making choices based on this self-interest. Smith argued in his famous treatise The Wealth of
Nations that people ultimately act in their own self-interest but that they also take into consideration the wider society
or greater good. So, it's not simply that we're all just selfish, even if we're making decisions based on our self-
interest. We're calculating our best choice but we're also thinking about the larger social context, which brings us to a
difference between sociology and economics.

Sources:

 http://what-when-how.com/social-sciences/rational-choice-theory-social-science/
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory
 https://study.com/academy/lesson/rational-choice-theory-history-theorists.html