The Rational Actor Model

The rational actor model is a basic organizing principle in economic theory. As I shall explain below, biologists generally employ the same model in understanding the behavior of organisms, albeit with different connotations (Grafen 1999; Gintis 2004). By contrast, psychologists generally reject this model altogether. This theoretical discrepancy must be squarely faced if fruitful collaboration between psychologists and biologists is to emerge, especially in areas where behavior is concerned, including behavioral game theory, animal behavior, gene-culture coevolution, and neuroeconomics. I argue here that the rational actor model is justified by basic evolutionary theory and should be conserved in transdisciplinary research, though it is better expressed as the beliefs, preferences, and constraints model, as the term “rational” is laden with irrelevant and misleading connotations. To document the rejection of the rational actor model in standard psychological theory, note that cognitive psychology generally defines the brain as an “information-processing organ,” but in fact the brain is a decision-making mechanism, information processing simply being a necessary element thereof. For instance, a widely used text of graduatelevel readings in psychology (Sternberg and Wagner 1999) devotes the ninth of 11 chapters to “Reasoning, Judgment, and Decision Making,” offering two papers, the first of which shows that human subjects generally fail simple logical inference tasks, and the second shows that human subjects are irrationally swayed by the way a problem is verbally “framed” by the experimenter. A leading undergraduate text (Goldstein 2005) placed “Reasoning and Decision Making” the last of 12 chapters. This includes one paragraph describing the rational actor model, followed by many pages purporting to explain why it is wrong. Behavioral psychology generally avoids positing internal states, of which preferences and beliefs, and even constraints, are examples. Not surprisingly, when the rational actor model is mentioned, it is summarily rejected (Kahneman et al. 1982; Herrnstein et al 1997). Not surprisingly, in a leading behavioral psychology text (Mazur 2002), choice is covered in the last of 14 chapters and is limited to a review of the literature on choice between concurrent reinforcement schedules and the capacity to defer gratification. Summing up a quarter century of psychological research in 1995, Paul Slovic asserted, accurately I believe, that “it is now generally recognized among psychologists that utility maximization provides only limited insight into the processes by which decisions are made” (Slovic 1995: 365). “People are not logical,” psychologists are fond of saying, “they are psychological.” Economics and biology aside, the behavioral sciences have generally spurned the rational actor model. Sociology and anthropology, in addition to cognitive, behavioral, and social psychology, broadly reject this model. Yet, the evolutionary argument for the rational actor model is strong. The fitness of an organism depends on how effectively it makes decisions in an uncertain and varying environment. Effective decision making is a function of the organism’s state of knowledge, which consists of the information supplied by the sensory inputs that monitor the organism’s internal states and its external environment. The fact that the brain is an organ adapted for fitness-maximizing decision making follows from basic biological principles. The brain is a costly organ that evolved because it enhanced the fitness of its carriers, and hence is structured to make on balance fitness-enhancing decisions in the face of the various constellations of sensory inputs it commonly faces. For every such constellation, each decision taken by the organism generates a probability distribution over fitness outcomes, the expected value of which is the fitness value associated with that decision. Since fitness is a scalar variable, for each constellation of sensory inputs, each possible action the organism might take has a specific fitness value, and organisms whose decision mechanisms are optimized for this environment will choose the available action

After the Second World War, a bipolar world, known as the Cold War Era, has been clearly formed between the Western Bloc and Communist Bloc while the United States and the Soviet Union at the peak on each side. In Eastern Europe, the United States was restrained and felt helpless about Soviet expansion in this area with the perception of Yalta system. On the other hand, in Asia, with the breakdown of talks, an all-out war resumed. A Chinese civil war fought between Kuomintang (also as KMT or Chinese National Party) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the end of 1948, KMT has occupied the inferior position. In the early period of 1949, CCP forces crossed the Yangtze River and successfully captured Nanking, the capital of KMT’s Republic of China (PRC) government. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with its capital at Beiping, which was renamed Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and millions of Nationalist Chinese retreated from mainland China to the island of Taiwan. Confronted with the CCP takeover of mainland China, the United States came to reformulate its China Policy which later marked a turning point in Sino-American relationship during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950. In June 1948, the leader of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, was officially denounced and his party, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), was ejected as a member of the Cominform by the Soviet Union. Since the West branded Tito a Soviet puppet for his loyalty and constancy of faith to Stalinism, the Tito-Stalin Split presented a whole new realm of possibilities to the United States for its dilemma in china—“Chinese Titoism.” With the influence of Stilwell Incident over Sino-American relationship and the facts of Tito-Stalin Split, Truman made an about-face change to U.S. China Policy in 1949. By the early 1949, the Truman Administration has already been making plans to diverge from Chiang and his KMT such as the publication of China White Paper; at the same time, Truman Administration keeping making chances to have conversations with the CCP. By meeting and negotiating with the CCP officials, Truman Administration attempted to disunite Communist China and the Soviet Union, expected Mao to be the “Asian Tito,” and then Communist China can joint forces with the United States to fight against the Soviet Union, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Until the outbreak of Korean War in June 1950, the United States finally realized that what it faced is hostile china along with the Sino-Soviet partnership. By applying Graham T. Allison’s three decision-making models, namely, the Rational Actor Model (RAM), the Organizational Behavior Model (OBM), and the Governmental Politics Model (GPM) as the theoretical structure and basis, the thesis would step by step explore the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950 through the perspectives of the rational assessment and choice on national interest, struggles between/among organizations based on different target and organizational culture, and pulling, hauling and bargaining games among relative bureaucrats. In addition, the thesis also applied the principles from Alexander L. George’s book, Presidential Decision-making in Foreign Policy, to aim at examining how President Truman’s, who has the final say, character, personality, value and world views made effect in the decision-making process of the target case study. In the process of theory confirming, the thesis discovered that by the period of transformation of Chinese regimes in 1949, the Tito-Stalin Split of 1948 presented the United States a new inspiration for the Communist World, that is, the Eastern Bloc is not a rigid “Iron Curtain.” Truman Administration considered that Titoism may set its roots upon China, the Yugoslav-Soviet Conflict could be a replay situation that occurred in mainland China, and both would put the strategic thought—Engaging China to counter the Soviet Threat—into practice. Nevertheless, from the historical perspectives, this kind of strategic thought seemed over-optimistic, which did not conform to fully rational considerations. However, with regard to the background of the early Cold War Era and the suspicion between the Truman Administration and KMT, the alternative that the United States took reflected the principles of “bounded rationality model.” As a result, by examining the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950, what the thesis explored not only the facts about the Sino-American relationship in this period, but also the continuity and change of Truman’s China Policy along with its cause and effect.

Inferring a person's goal from their behavior is an important problem in applications of AI (e.g. automated assistants, recommender systems). The workhorse model for this task is the rational actor model - this amounts to assuming that people have stable reward functions, discount the future exponentially, and construct optimal plans. Under the rational actor assumption techniques such as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) can be used to infer a person's goals from their actions. A competing model is the dual-system model. Here decisions are the result of an interplay between a fast, automatic, heuristic-based system 1 and a slower, deliberate, calculating system 2. We generalize the dual system framework to the case of Markov decision problems and show how to compute optimal plans for dual-system agents. We show that dual-system agents exhibit behaviors that are incompatible with rational actor assumption. We show that naive applications of rational-actor IRL to the behavior of dual-system agents can generate wrong inference about the agents' goals and suggest interventions that actually reduce the agent's overall utility. Finally, we adapt a simple IRL algorithm to correctly infer the goals of dual system decision-makers. This allows us to make interventions that help, rather than hinder, the dual-system agent's ability to reach their true goals.

Straipsnyje pateikiama racionalumo sampratų M. Weberio sociologijoje ir racionalaus pasirinkimo prieigoje (RPP) analizė. Nagrinėjama, koks yra vėberiškosios praktinio racionalumo sampratos ir racionalaus pasirinkimo teorijos (RPT) eksplikuojamos racionalaus pasirinkimo sąvokos santykis, analizuojama, kaip RPT gali prisidėti prie M.Weberio sociologijos pagrindų supratimo, kuo ir kaip vėberiškoji racionalumo samprata gali būti inspiracijos šaltinis tolesnei RPP raidai. Teigiama, kad M. Weberio subjektyviai racionalaus instrumentinio veiksmo sąvoka anticipuoja ribinio naudingumo teorijos transformaciją į numatomos naudos teoriją. M. Weberio suprantanti sociologija anticipuoja RPP versiją, kurią vadiname segmentiniu universalizmu. M. Weberio instrumentiškai racionalus veiksmas ir vertybiškai racionalus veiksmas yra gimininės praktinio racionalumo sąvokos rūšys. Ta gimininė sąvoka kaip racionalų kvalifikuoja elgesį, kuris yra nuoseklus (neprieštaringas) pagrindų, galinčių pretenduoti į platesnį ar siauresnį pripažinimą, atžvilgiu. M. Weberio racionalaus veiksmo samprata gali būti detalizuota skiriant dvi instrumentiškai racionalaus veiksmo atmainas ir panaudota M. Weberio pateiktam moderniosios visuomenės apibūdinimui papildyti.

Having embraced the assumption of the individual's rationality, most studies in International Relations conclude that groups, institutions, and states are also rational actors and can take rational decisions. To these assumptions the strongest criticism so far has come from bureaucratic-politics studies. This article, through reviewing the seminal works in bureaucratic politics, reflects on the criticisms leveled against the rationality assumption at three basic levels, namely individual, group, and bureaucracy. Although bureaucratic politics has made invaluable contribution to the field by demonstrating that actors sometimes did not and cannot take rational decisions, if social scientists' objective is not only explanation and understanding but also prediction, then, the rationality assumption is somewhat necessary. Those social scientists, who have been trying to contribute to the development of social science and to provide policy suggestions with leaders and policy makers, will need to adopt the assumption of rationality and simplify complex social issues and the data in hand. This conclusion does not mean that we can underestimate the frequency or the importance of irrational behavior in international politics, but that social scientists working under the assumption of rationality can better hope that we can predict future events.

Homo Ludens: Social rationality and political behavior

As stated elsewhere in this issue, we cannot claim to explain an institution's origin just by the functions it serves. In part thismay be because of the cognitive limitations of those actors who are instrumental in institutional formation and institutional change. But even more clearly, it is the case that rational instrumental choice does not imply functional institutions. Just as rational choice in a prisoner's dilemma may result in inefficient policies, rational choice by actors with conflicting preferencesfor institutions may result in institutions that are suboptimal. Examples of rational choice explanations of dysfunctional institutions are provided in the area of bureaucracy, regulation, healthcare, and budgeting. I argue that the paradoxes and impossibility results of rational choice theory offer the best insights currently available into the persistent inefficiencies of the world ofpolitics.

The prisoner's dilemma has evolved into a standard game for analyzing the success of cooperative strategies in repeated games. With the aim of investigating the behavior of strategies in some alternative games we analyzed the outcome of iterated games for both the prisoner's dilemma and the chicken game. In the chicken game, mutual defection is punished more strongly than in the prisoner's dilemma, and yields the lowest fitness. We also ran our analyses under different levels of noise. The results reveal a striking difference in the outcome between the games. Iterated chicken game needed more generations to find a winning strategy. It also favored nice, forgiving strategies able to forgive a defection from an opponent. In particular the well-known strategy tit-for-tat has a poor successrate under noisy conditions. The chicken game conditions may be relatively common in other sciences, and therefore we suggest that this game should receive more interest as a cooperative game from researchers within computer science.

The question of normsNorms have three functions: they define, describe and pre/proscribe. For sociology, the important thing is that norms are rules of conduct. But not all action is rule-governed. There is also rational (instrumental) action, as studied by rational choice. Most concrete actions are both normative and rational. To what extent actions are normative and to what extent they are rational is an empirical matter. Important questions for an empirical approach to social norms include the following: what are the conditions favouring normative and rational action respectively? What are the most important types of social norms and how do they work? When do norms emerge and when do the cease to affect action?

Social class differentiation in education results not only from differences in academic ability and processes of institutional differentiation but also from processes of self‐selection by pupils, students and their parents in the progression through the school system and into higher education, training and employment. This paper examines the explanation of class differences in choices at transition or branching points in the system which is offered by Rational Action Theory in the light of evidence from qualitative studies of educational transitions. It also explores the relationship of ‘rational action’ to Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction, with reference to some recent research into parental choice of school. It concludes with a discussion of a reconceptualised notion of ‘rational action’.

The increasingly wide spread use of RCM, rational choice modeling, and RCT, rational choice theory, in disciplines like economics, law, ethics, psychology, sociology, political science, management facilitates interdisciplinary exchange. This is a great achievement. Yet it nurtures the hope that a unified account of rational (inter-)active choice making might arise from ‘reason’ in (a priori) terms of intuitively appealing axioms. Such ‘rationalist’ characterizations of rational choice neglect real human practices and empirical accounts of those practices. This is theoretically misleading and practically dangerous. Searching for a wide reflective equilibrium, WRE, on RCT in evidence-oriented ways can explicate ‘rational’ without rationalism.

Do individuals with problematic and non-problematic internet game use differ in cooperative behaviors with partners of different social distances? Evidence from the Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken Game

I examine three attitudes: belief, faith, and hope. I argue that all three attitudes play the same role in rationalizing action. First, I explain two models of rational action—the decision-theory model and the belief-desire model. Both models entail there are two components of rational action: an epistemic component and a conative component. Then, using this framework, I show how belief, faith, and hope that p can all make it rational to accept, or act as if, p. I conclude by showing how my picture can explain how action-oriented commitments can be rational over time, both in the face of counterevidence and in the face of waning affections.

Emotion recognition, ‘theory of mind,’ and social behavior in schizophrenia

Law and Economics’ Responses to the Threat of Its Initial Success This paper starts by reviewing empirical research that threatens law and economics’ initial success. This research has demonstrated that the functioning of the law cannot be well understood based on the assumption of the rational actor and that policies which are based on this assumption are likely to be flawed. Subsequently, three responses to this criticism are discussed. Whereas the first response denounces this criticism by maintaining that the limitations attributed to the rational actor can easily be incorporated in rational choice theory, the second response welcomes the criticism as an opportunity to come up with an integrative theory of law and behavior. The third response also takes the criticism seriously but replaces the aspiration to come up with such an integrative theory by a context-sensitive approach. It will be argued that the first two responses fall short while the third response offers a promising way to go forward.