| Chapter 1: | Social Conformity: The Collective Dimension |
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People form societies but societies also mold people. Groups do things that cannot be explained, or have yet to be explained, by rational choice models of individual behavior. Individuals change their preferences and behavior because of what other people do, and their preferences are not strictly independent of others’. How does one explain altruism, for example, or the people who make an organ donation or give their life for another? And what about the situations when individuals behave differently in groups than they would if acting alone? Think about office parties, riots after football games, and criminal gangs.
A rational choice theorist might still counter, however, that group influences ultimately trace back to individual preferences and choices. An economist trying to explain why people vote, for example, will assert that if the personal gain from voting exceeds the cost, a person will vote.16 Of course, it is rarely possible to know how anyone assesses the potential gain or cost of voting, much less an entire population, and no two people would necessarily agree on it. Although the rational argument has logical consistency, it has failed to explain voter turnout by any quantitative measure.17 In a large election, the odds of a single voter’s affecting the result are so small that one must question that there is any potential gain for voting. So why do millions of people vote? Other research, as discussed later in the book, points to people’s conformity with the norm that good citizens ought to vote as a better explanation for most voters’ behavior. The rational theorist replies again that, well, there must be some personal gain in following the citizenship norm, or loss for not conforming; so rational theory truly does explain it. It is for us to discover the point of view of the voter that makes it rational.18 In general, however, that has not been done. Rational choice has met with increasing criticism on three counts: the fact that some of its principal assumptions do not square with how people actually behave,19 that it has epistemological problems,20 and that it has failed to produce nontrivial predictions and applications in political science, as for voting.21
Jon Elster examines the cleavage between rational and sociological views of human nature: the question as to whether people are motivated to act for personal reward or swayed by social forces.22 Although he starts out as a proponent of rational choice, he concludes that social norms cannot be reduced to rationality or any other type of optimizing individual decision making.