Grade: 11

Strand: HUMSS
Semester: Second Semester
Subject Teacher: Cristalyn M. Rosal
Subject Title: Disciplines and Ideas in the Social Sciences (DISS)

Lesson for 4th Quarter:

DOMINANT APPROACHES AND IDEAS Part 2

Rational Choice
Reference: Disciplines and Ideas in the Social Sciences by Jose and Ong
pages: pp. 71-74

When can a choice be called rational?

• Rational – means people act based on or in accordance with reason or logic
• Choice – refers to an act of selecting or making a decision when faced two or more possibilities

Rational Choice Theory

• Choice theory or rational action theory
• It explains social phenomena as outcomes of individual choices that can – in some way – be
construed as rational
• One of the many positivist theories that try to explain human behavior in terms of utility
maximization.
• the idea that when a person is confronted with a set of choices, that person will choose
the option that will serve his or her objectives
Positivism
• from French word positivisme – “imposed in the mind by experience”
• Refers to the philosophy of science that asserts that the only source of trustworthy knowledge is
the information obtained from rational conducts and reports of sensory experience.

Rational Choice Theory

When applied to economics,
• people estimate the probable costs and benefits of any action before deciding what to do
• they tend to choose the course of action that is likely to give the greatest satisfaction at the lowest
costs possible.

The beginning of the foundations of rational choice:

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)
– tried to explain the basic functioning of political institutions through individual choices
– choices came from universally held desires and dislikes

The Major Contributors to the Rational Choice Theory:

Gary Becker (1930-2014) - American economist

• received the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics for “having extended the domain of economic theory
to aspects of human behavior which had previously been dealt with—if at all—by other social
science disciplines such as sociology, demography and criminology.”
• In the 1950s and 1960s he applied his models in several areas: investments in people's
competence (or human capital), behavior in households and families, crime and punishment, and
discrimination in labor and other markets.
George Homans (1910-1989) - American sociologist
• 2 books - The Human Group (1950) and Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms
(1961/1974) are considered world-classics in sociology.
•  The father of social exchange theory
• the belief that individual beings and behavior are pertinent to comprehending society

Homans’ Exchange Theory

• People will perform an action depending on their insight of the likelihood of success.
• A person is more likely to help someone in need if in his past experience, his actions has been
rewarded.

Strengths of Rational Choice

• allows preferences to be represented as real-valued utility functions
• provides a compact theory that makes empirical predictions with a relatively sparse model
• strikingly general – has been used to analyze not only personal and household choices about
traditional economic matters like consumption and savings, choices in education, migration,
crime and business.

Weaknesses of Rational Choice

• Social agents do not continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria
• The empirical outputs of rational choice theory have been limited
• People are not always able to obtain all the information they would need to make the best
possible decision.

References
Arcinas, M.M. (2016). Disciplines and Ideas in the Social Sciences. Phoenix Publishing House, Inc.:
Quezon City.
Jose, M. D. & Ong, J. A. (2016). Disciplines and Ideas in the Social Sciences. Vibal Group Inc.: Quezon
City.

PRACTICE ACTIVITY
Reflect on a personal decision you made (e.g. choosing a course or school) following the rational
choice perspective. List the choices that you had until you arrived at your final decision. Write a
short reflection about this lesson.