International Studies Compendium Project

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Comment on this article   In an article published in World Politics in 1969, the game theorist John Harsanyi wrote that during the preceding twenty years there had been renewed efforts to develop a general theory of social behavior. Most of those efforts, he said, depended on two main postulates: One is the functionalist […] approach to the explanation of social institutions […]. For lack of an established technical term, we shall call the other postulate the conformist approach to the explanation of individual behavior : it is based on the assumption that uniformities of individual behavior in a given society can best be understood in terms of certain commonly accepted social values , which most members of the society tend to internalize during their socialization process. ( Harsanyi 1969 :513; italics in original) Three criticisms had been made of those approaches, Harsanyi said: they overstated the degree of consensus in societies, they could not account for change, and they described observed behavior without explaining it. The question raised by these criticisms, he wrote, is “whether there is any alternative approach not open to similar objections”: Our main purpose in this paper is to show that such an alternative approach is in fact provided by theories based on the concept of rational choice (rational behavior, or rational decision-making) – borrowed from economics, ... log in or subscribe to read full text