Rational Choice

Question 1

What is rational choice and what are its main assumptions?

Answer 1

Rational choice is the predominant conceptualisation of rationality in IR. It is based on five assumptions:

1. Actors have consistent and stable preferences.
2. Human preferences are obvious (power, wealth).
3. Actors search for a course of action that is optimally suited to pursue their preferences.
4. Actors are constrained in their means-ends calculation.
5. Information available to actors shapes their means-ends calculations.

Question 2

What criticism of rational choice does psychology offer?

Answer 2

• Bounded Rationality: Actors are not omniscient and computational geniuses but are challenged by their environment. Thus, actors rely on heuristics and trial by error methods to search for alternatives and adjust their aspiration levels. They do not optimise but satisfice, i.e. find a minimum level required to achieve a goal.
• Prospect Theory: Decision-making is a two-step process. They start by editing, i.e. framing the situation by defining a reference point against which they judge loss or gains. Then they evaluate, i.e. if the situation pushes actors into a loss, they are more risk-prone, and if they are in the realm of gains, they are risk-averse.
• Fast and Frugal Heuristics: Actors pick clues from an adaptive toolbox, i.e. simple, task-specific decision strategies that are part of a decision maker’s repertoire of cognitive strategies for solving judgment and decision tasks.
• Emotions: Emptions work as a switch between habit and reasoning. Actors act habitually to routine challenges posed by their environment and only start to actively reason when they are emotionally engaged in the situation.

Question 3

What criticism of Rational Choice does constructivism offer?

Answer 3

• Preference Formation: Preferences are not as obvious as rational choice assumes them to be. They have to be endogenized and explained; they cannot be simply assumed. Key for the formation of preferences is the evolution of an actor’s identity.
• Logic of Appropriateness: The logic of consequences (cost-benefit calculation about outcomes) overlooks the social embeddedness of actors. Actors are enmeshed in a web of social meaning, which provides an orientation for actors about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. Even if an action would be the most profit-maximising, actors would usually not violate prescriptions ingrained in this web of meaning because doing so would violate their identity.
• Logic of Argumentation:
  o Consensual: Actors liberate about what they do and listen carefully about what others have to say. Sometimes they chose the opposite of what their initial reaction is because someone else has a better argument.
  o Advocacy: Actors believing in the message they disseminate present their arguments to an audience, trying to make the argument resonate
  o Rhetorical Action: Actors use rhetorical devices to talk to other actors into what is for them a beneficial course of action (e.g. shaming).
• Logic of Practice: Circumscribed by their habitus, actors are strategic in what they do. They try to accumulate capital (material, symbolic etc.) yet they do not engage in computation or deliberation. Instead they fall back on background knowledge and practices that they have acquired over time. Enacting background knowledge and practices reproduces them. Thus, understanding an actor’s choice we need to understand their habitus, i.e. their socially ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions.