Social behavior and the covid pandemic

Anyone who thinks that the social world is orderly and predictable needs to reflect carefully on the way the covid pandemic has played out in the United States and many other countries. For political scientists who are partial to rational-choice explanations of individual behavior -- you'll need to think again. No theory of rationality or rational self-interest I can think of would explain massive anti-vaccination activism. It is plain from the statistics of infection rates, hospital rates, and death rates, that a population that is slow to accept a high percentage of vaccination is a population that is likely to wind up in covid catastrophe. A family that rejects vaccination is likely to suffer serious illness and runs a risky likelihood of hospitalization and death. And an individual who rejects vaccination and goes off on his Harley to Sturgis, South Dakota is flirting with illness and the possibility of hospitalization and death as well. So why would a rational or sensible person make that decision? This isn't quantum mechanics and high-flying scientific theory; epidemiology is an observational science, and its premises and reasoning can be followed by anyone with a high school education. And the germ theory of infectious disease is one of the most important achievements of medical science -- and has been for a century and a half. Would the same anti-vax activist walk into a Chernobyl reactor on April 26, 1986, because he doesn't believe in radiation, or doesn't believe that exposure to radiation causes illness and death? So -- irrational behavior on a massive scale. Are we in a Salem moment, a period of mass hysteria? Why are so many people behaving in ways that are objectively contrary to their most important interests?

The too-obvious answer is that "some people have been indoctrinated by anti-science propaganda and lies, and have come to believe that covid is a hoax and the vaccines are dangerous and useless". And in fact, we know that very extensive social media and right-wing media outlets have promulgated exactly those messages -- including pervasive Facebook and Youtube channels. But why would perhaps 35-40% of American adults fall for such obvious baloney?

The second too-obvious answer is that Trump and the extreme right -- i.e., most of the GOP -- found it to their political advantage to encourage belief in these lies. To support Trumpism in the past year is to be a vaccine skeptic and a covid skeptic. The core of Trump's supporters fall in line in accepting conspiracies and lies -- about covid, about the 2020 election, and about Democrats, and GOP leaders have been willing to work to energize and extend this group. This is "extremist populism" and opportunism at its purest -- promote the lies even if it means illness and death for school children, neighbors, and family members. This puts the current realities of social behavior around covid into a different light, and one that is a bit more amenable to rational-choice treatment: the strategy is a rational one for the demagogues who are pushing it, but completely irrational for the followers. The political emotions and ideologies of the followers, shaped by social media, lead them to make life choices that put them and their communities at terrible risk.

But here's the thing: what 2010-era sociologist or political scientist would have predicted that a major global pandemic would occur in the next several decades, that an almost miraculous search for an effective vaccine would be successful in an amazingly short period -- and that the pandemic and vaccine would become a political issue leading to mass refusal to vaccinate? All global epidemiologists believed the first proposition -- that pandemic would occur sometime; some biological researchers thought that vaccine creation could advance quickly; but I can't think of any respected political scientist or sociologist who would have predicted the massive movement that has emerged against vaccination and the politicization of the spread of the virus. 

This seems to be a good example of "path-dependence" in history. This public health catastrophe we now face could have unfolded differently in the United States. There were GOP leaders in 2019 and 2020 when the virus was first perceived as a major threat to US public health who pursued a science-driven set of policies. But the extremism of Donald Trump and his followers made a science-based approach to public policy and public health untenable for most GOP governors and legislators. (Even today we hear of death threats against public health professionals who argue for a mask mandate in public schools as they re-open this fall.) 

If our current situation was path-dependent, then what events led us here? We could probably identify two or three key factors in 2019 and 2020 that pushed the US population off the path of "sane public health thinking" and onto the QAnon path of lies, doubt, and conspiracy theories -- the persistent efforts by the Trump administration to minimize and trivialize the virus (and to attribute it to China); the onslaught of organized social media campaigns to the same effect; and an existing baseline of mistrust and disdain for the Federal government (e.g. Ammon Bundy's takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2018).

Above I asked whether a vaccine skeptic might have walked into Chernobyl reactor in 1986 because she didn't believe in radiation sickness. In a way, the example might be more illuminating than was first evident. A viral epidemic -- even a highly deadly one -- is not like an open reactor core. Everyone who is exposed to radiation levels found in the exploded Chernobyl reactor core will die, and will die in visibly horrible conditions. But even a highly contagious virus like the Delta variant of the covid virus is less visible than the glowing remnants of the Chernobyl fuel rods. Today the state of Florida has an extremely high incidence of new covid infections -- 100.9 per 100,000 population. (Mississippi is even higher, at 114.1 per hundred thousand; whereas Michigan and Massachusetts are at about 19-20 per hundred thousand.) So Florida is a catastrophe. And yet the vast majority of Floridians do not often see the results of the pandemic on a daily basis. Only .1% of the population are infected each day; a tiny risk, one might say. Floridians see news reports about rising rates of infection and hospitals approaching full capacity, but these are just words in a torrent of media that they have come to mistrust. Further, they can also go to a bar or restaurant and not see anyone getting sick, and they may avoid infection themselves for months or years (through good luck or simple precautions). What is a catastrophe at the community level is invisible to the majority of Floridians -- until their own parent, spouse, or child is infected. And then it is just "bad luck". So most Floridians, most of the time, have a daily experience that seems to support the "no big deal" framework rather than the "rapidly spreading horrific disease" framework. But a viral epidemic is different from car crashes: more infected people leads to an even greater number of infected people in the next cycle. It is an exponential process. So it is urgent to take measures to reduce contagion at an early stage of the pandemic -- which is precisely what many Red states have refused to do. 

Public health during pandemic is not an individual choice. A policy depending on "responsible choices" by individuals (concerning social distancing or masking, for example) is wholly inadequate to the problem. The slogan used by anti-maskers during current raging debates over mask requirements in public schools -- "My child, my choice" -- is absurd on its face. The unmasked child is a risk to others; so it is not simply a matter of personal choice -- any more than would the choice of bringing bottles of gasoline to school be a matter of personal choice. And, further, one's own child is dramatically less likely to become infected if other people's children are masked. Public health requires rational standards of behavior and a high level of compliance. But in many GOP-ruled states, officials have refused to set such regulations. 

It seems, then, that American mass behavior during the past 12 months shows a very large dose of irrationality, and this level of irrationality is dangerous in the setting of a viral pandemic. And it did not have to be this way. If the vast majority of Americans were behaving intelligently with respect to their own health, they would be accepting the advice of scientific and health experts about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and they would be supporting the call for masking until the viral surge of infections falls to an acceptably low level. Each individual would be better off if he or she got vaccinated and wore a mask. And the same is true collectively: the whole community -- whether Columbus, Ohio or Miami, Florida -- is better off if the infection rate (R) is brought down below 1.0 and the hospital utilization rate is at a sustainable level. 

Further, the pandemic threatens public health in more ways than the possibility of acute respiratory illness for one individual. When hospital intensive care units fill up, they lose the capacity to treat acutely ill patients of every variety. By remaining unvaccinated, becoming ill, and winding up on a ventilator in an ICU, the individual has harmed her own health; but she has also made it more difficult for other members of the community to gain access to the intensive care that they need as well. Each Floridian is more likely to survive a serious auto accident or a heart attack if there is an ICU bed available to treat her -- and this is a community-level fact. So whether we care primarily about our own health and the health of our families, or we care also about the wellbeing of our neighbors and fellow members of the community, sensible decision-making leads to sensible health behavior: vaccination, social distancing, and masking. The fact that 39% of the population in the US are still entirely unvaccinated (August 27) seems to document irrational personal choices on a massive scale. 

This seems to pose a very important and difficult problem for the social sciences. Is prudence such a weak influence on the typical person's choices as it appears? Is there a kind of "crowd" behavior at work that makes individual prudence and rationality irrelevant -- an echo chamber that makes independent thinking impossible? Is there some special difficulty in reasoning about an invisible diffuse risk like covid that is part of the problem? Are the avenues of social media messaging so powerful that large portions of the public lose their capacity for intelligent, sensible thought? What can we learn, in short, by studying the patterns of behavior that have emerged in the US over the past eighteen months? Are we living through a "natural experiment" in mass behavior when a population is faced with a novel and widespread threat?

Rational life plans and the stopping problem

Image: a poor solution to the stopping problem

In earlier posts I discussed the question of "rational plans of life" (link, link, link, link) and argued that standard theories of rational decision making under uncertainty don't do well in this context. I argued instead that rationality in navigating and building a life is not analogous to remodeling your kitchen; instead, it involves provisional clarification of the goals and values that one embraces, and then a kind of step-by-step, self-critical direction-setting in the choices that one makes over time in ways that honor these values.

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths' Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions provides a very interesting additional perspective on this problem of living a life. The authors describe the algorithms that computer science has discovered to handle difficult choice problems, and they make an effort to both explain (generally) how the problem is solved formally and how it finds application in ordinary situations of human decision-making over an extended time -- such as the challenging question of where to stop for a meal on a long road trip, or which candidate to hire as an executive assistant.

The key features of decision-making that drive much of their discussion are time and uncertainty. We often have to make decisions and choices among options where we do not know the qualities of the items on offer (restaurants to consider for a special meal, individuals who are prospective friends, who to hire for an important position), the likelihood of success of a given item, and where we often cannot return to a choice we've already rejected. (If we are driving between Youngstown and Buffalo there are only finitely many restaurants where we might stop for a meal; but once we've passed New Bangkok Restaurant at exit 50 on the interstate, we are unlikely to return when we haven't found a better choice by exit 55.)

The stopping problem seems relevant to the problem of formulating a rational plan of life, since the stream of life events and choices in a person's life is one-directional, and it is rare to be able to return to an option that was rejected at a prior moment. In hindsight -- should I have gone to Harvard for graduate school, or would Cornell or Princeton have been a better choice? The question is literally pointless; it cannot be undone. Life, like history, proceeds in only one direction. Many life choices must be made before a full comparison of the quality of the options and the consequences of one choice or another can be fully known. And waiting until all options have been reviewed often means that the earlier options are no longer available -- just like that Thai restaurant on the Ohio Turnpike at exit 50.

The algorithms that surround the stopping problem have a specific role in decision-making in ordinary life circumstances: we will make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty and irreversibility if we understand something about the probabilities of the idea that "a better option is still coming up". We need to have some intuitive grasp of the dialectic of "exploration / exploitation" that the stopping problem endorses. As Christian and Griffiths put it, "exploration is gathering information, and exploitation is using the information you have to get a known good result" (32). How long should we continue to gather information (exploration) and at what point should we turn to active choice ("choose the next superior candidate that comes along")? If a person navigates life by exploring 90% of options before choosing, he or she is likely to do worse than less conservative decision-makers; but likewise about the person who chooses after seeing 5% of the options.

There is a very noticeable convergence between the algorithms of stopping and Herbert Simon's theory of satisficing (link). (The authors note this parallel in a footnote.) Simon noted that the heroic assumptions of economic rationality are rarely satisfied in actual human decision-making: full information about the probabilities and utilities associated with a finite range of outcomes, and choice guided by choosing that option with the greatest expected utility. He notes that this view of rationality requires an unlimited budget for information gathering, and that -- at some point -- the cost of further search outweighs the probably gains of finding the optimal solution. Simon too argues that rational decision-makers "stop" in their choices: they set a threshold value for quality and value, initiate a search, and select the first option that meets the threshold. "Good enough" beats "best possible". If I decide I need a pair of walking shoes, I decide on price and quality -- less than $100, all leather, good tread, comfortable fit -- and I visit a sequence of shoe stores, with the plan of buying the first pair of shoes that meets the threshold. But the advantage of the search algorithm described here is that it does not require a fixed threshold in advance, and it would appear to give a higher probability of making the best possible choice among all available options. As a speculative guess, it seems as though searches guided by a fixed threshold would score lower over time than searches guided by a balanced "explore, then exploit" strategy, without the latter being overwhelmed by information costs.

In one of the earlier posts on "rational life plans" I suggested that rationality comes into life-planning in several different ways:

We might describe this process as one that involves local action-rationality guided by medium term strategies and oriented towards long term objectives. Rationality comes into the story at several points: assessing cause and effect, weighing the importance of various long term goals, deliberating across conflicting goals and values, working out the consequences of one scenario or another, etc. (link)

The algorithms of stopping are clearly relevant to the first part of the story -- local action-rationality. It is not so clear that the stopping problem arises in the same way in the other two levels of life-planning rationality. Deliberation about longterm objectives is not sequential in the way that deciding about which highway exit to choose for supper is; rather, the deliberating individual can canvas a number of objectives simultaneously and make deliberative choices among them. And choosing medium-term strategies seems to have a similar temporal logic: identify a reasonable range of possible strategies, compare their strengths and weaknesses, and choose the best. So the stopping problem seems to be relevant to the implementation phase of living, not the planning and projecting parts. We don't need the stopping algorithm to decide to visit the grandchildren in Scranton, or in deciding which route across the country to choose for the long drive; but we do need it for deciding the moment-to-moment options that arise -- which hotel, which restaurant, which stretch of beach, which tourist attraction to visit along the way. This seems to amount to a conclusion: the stopping problem is relevant to a certain class of choices that come as an irreversible series, but not relevant to deliberation among principles, values, or guiding goals.

(Christian and Griffiths describe the results of research on the stopping problem; but the book does not give a clear description of how the math works. Here is a somewhat more detailed explanation of the solution to the stopping problem in American Scientist; link. Essentially the solution -- wait and observe for the first 37% of options, then taken the next option better than any of those seen to date -- follows from a calculation of the probability of the distribution of "best choices" across the random series of candidates. And it can be proven that both lower and higher thresholds -- less exploration or more exploration -- lead to lower average payoffs.)

Rational choice institutionalism

Where do institutions come from? And what kinds of social forces are at work to stabilize them once they are up and running?  These are questions that historical institutionalists like Kathleen Thelen have considered in substantial depth (link, link, link). But the rational-choice paradigm has also offered some answers to these questions as well. The basic idea presented by the RCT paradigm is that institutions are the result of purposive agents coping with existential problems, forming alliances, and pursuing their interests in a rational way. James Coleman is one of the exponents of this approach in Foundations of Social Theory, where he treats institutions and norms as coordinated and mutually reinforcing patterns of individual behavior (link).

An actor-centered theory of institutions requires a substantial amount of boot-strapping: we need to have an account of how a set of rules and practices could have emerged from the purposive but often conflictual activities of individuals, and we need a similar account of how those rules are stabilized and enforced by individuals who have no inherent interest in the stability of the rules within which they act. Further, we need to take account of well-known conflicts between private and public benefits, short-term and long-term benefits, and intended and unintended benefits. Rational-choice theorists since Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups have made it clear that we cannot explain social outcomes on the basis of the collective benefits that they provide; rather, we need to show how those arrangements result from relatively myopic, relatively self-interested actors with bounded ability to foresee consequences.

Ken Shepsle is a leading advocate for a rational-choice theory of institutions within political science. He offers an exposition of his thinking in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (link). He distinguishes between institutions as exogenous and institutions as endogenous. The first conception takes the rules and practices of an institution as fixed and external to the individuals who operate within them, while the second looks at the rules and practices as being the net result of the intentions and actions of those individuals themselves. On the second view, it is open to the individuals within an activity to attempt to change the rules; and one set of rules will perhaps have better results for one set of interests than another. So the choice of rules in an activity is not a matter of indifference to the participants. (For example, untenured faculty might undertake a campaign to change the way the university evaluates teaching in the context of the tenure process, or to change the relative weights assigned to teaching and research.) Shepsle also distinguishes between structured and unstructured institutions -- a distinction that other authors characterize as "formal/informal". The distinction has to do with the degree to which the rules of the activity are codified and reinforced by strong external pressures. Shepsle encompasses various informal solutions to collective action problems under the rubric of unstructured institutions -- fluid solutions to a transient problem.

This description of institutions begins to frame the problem, but it doesn't go very far. In particular, it doesn't provide much insight into the dynamics of conflict over rule-setting among parties with different interests in a process. Other scholars have pushed the analysis further.

French sociologists Crozier and Friedberg address this problem in Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action (1980 [1977]). Their premise is that actors within organizations have substantially more agency and freedom than they are generally afforded by orthodox organization theory, and we can best understand the workings and evolution of the organization as (partially) the result of the strategic actions of the participants (instead of understanding the conduct of the participants as a function of the rules of the organization). They look at institutions as solutions to collective action problems -- tasks or performances that allow attainment of a goal that is of interest to a broad public, but for which there are no antecedent private incentives for cooperation. Organized solutions to collective problems -- of which organizations are key examples -- do not emerge spontaneously; instead, "they consist of nothing other than solutions, always specific, that relatively autonomous actors have created, invented, established, with their particular resources and capacities, to solve these challenges for collective action" (15). And Crozier and Friedberg emphasize the inherent contingency of these particular solutions; there are always alternative solutions, neither better nor worse. This is a rational-choice analysis, though couched in sociological terms rather than economists' terms. (Here is a more extensive discussion of Crozier and Friedberg; link.)

Jack Knight brings conflict and power into the rational-choice analysis of the emergence of institutions in Institutions and Social Conflict.

I argue that the emphasis on collective benefits in theories of social institutions fails to capture crucial features of institutional development and change. I further argue that our explanations should invoke the distributional effects of such institutions and the conflict inherent in those effects. This requires an investigation of those factors that determine how these distributional conflicts are resolved. (13-14)

Institutions are not created to constrain groups or societies in an effort to avoid suboptimal outcomes but, rather, are the by-product of substantive conflicts over the distributions inherent in social outcomes. (40)

Knight believes that we need to have microfoundations for the ways in which institutions emerge and behave (14), and he seeks those mechanisms in the workings of rational choices by the participants within the field of interaction within which the institution emerges.

Actors choose their strategies under various circumstances. In some situations individuals regard the rest of their environment, including the actions of others, as given. They calculate their optimal strategy within the constraints of fixed parameters.... But actors are often confronted by situations characterized by an interdependence between other actors and themselves.... Under these circumstances individuals must choose strategically by incorporating the expectations of the actions of others into their own decision making. (17)

This implies, in particular, that we should not expect socially optimal or efficient outcomes in the emergence of institutions; rather, we should expect institutions that differentially favor the interests of some groups and disfavor those of other groups -- even if the social total is lower than a more egalitarian arrangement.

I conclude that social efficiency cannot provide the substantive content of institutional rules. Rational self-interested actors will not be the initiators of such rules if they diminish their own utility. Therefore rational-choice explanations of social institutions based on gains in social efficiency fail as long as they are grounded in the intentions of social actors. (34)

Knight's work explicitly refutes the occasional Panglossian (or Smithian) assumptions sometimes associated with rational choice theory and micro-economics: the idea that individually rational action leads to a collectively efficient outcome (the invisible hand). This may be true in the context of certain kinds of markets; but it is not generally true in the social and political world. And Knight shows in detail how the assumption fails in the case of institutional emergence and ongoing workings.

Rational choice theory is one particular and specialized version of actor-centered social science (link). It differs from other approaches in the very narrow assumptions it makes about the actor's particular form of agency; it assumes narrow economic rationality rather than a broader conception of agency or practical rationality (link). What seems clear to me is that we need to take an actor-centered approach if we want to understand institutions -- either their emergence or their continuing functioning and change. So the approach taken by rational-choice theorists is ontologically correct. If RCT fails to provide an adequate analysis of institutions, it is because the underlying theory of agency is fundamentally unrealistic about human actors.

Values, directions, and action

 

Several earlier posts have raised the question of rational life planning. What is involved in orchestrating one's goals and activities in such a way as to rationally create a good life in the fullness of time?

We have seen that there is something wildly unlikely about the idea of a developed, calculated life plan. Here is a different way of thinking about this question, framed about directionality and values rather than goals and outcomes. We might think of life planning in these terms:

• The actor frames a high-level life conception -- how he/she wants to live, what to achieve, what activities are most valued, what kind of person he/she wants to be. It is a work in progress.
• The actor confronts the normal developmental issues of life through limited moments in time: choice of education, choice of spouse, choice of career, strategies within the career space, involvement with family, level of involvement in civic and religious institutions, time and activities spent with friends, ... These are week-to-week and year-to-year choices, some more deliberate than others.
• The actor makes choices in the moment in a way that combines short-term and long-term considerations, reflecting the high-level conception but not dictated by it.
• The actor reviews, assesses, and updates the life conception. Some goals are reformulated; some are adjusted in terms of priority; others are abandoned.

This picture looks quite a bit different from more architectural schemes for creating and implementing a life plan considered in earlier posts, including the view that Rawls offers for conceiving of a rational plan of life. Instead of modeling life planning after a vacation trip assisted by an AAA TripTik (turn-by-turn instructions for how to reach your goal), this scheme looks more like the preparation and planning that might have guided a great voyage of exploration in the sixteenth century. There were no maps, the destination was unknown, the hazards along the way could only be imagined. But there were a few guiding principles of navigation -- "Keep making your way west," "Sail around the biggest storms," "Strive to keep reserves for unanticipated disasters," "Maintain humane relations with the crew." And, with a modicum of good fortune, these maxims might be enough to lead to discovery.

This scheme is organized around directionality and regular course correction, rather than a blueprint for arriving at a specific destination. And it appears to be all around a more genuine understanding of what is involved in making reflective life choices. Fundamentally this conception involves having in the present a vision of the dimensions of an extended life that is specifically one's own -- a philosophy, a scheme of values, a direction-setting self understanding, and the basics needed for making near-term decisions chosen for their compatibility with the guiding life philosophy. And it incorporates the idea of continual correction and emendation of the plan, as life experience brings new values and directions into prominence.

The advantage of this conception of rational life planning is that it is not heroic in its assumptions about the scope of planning and anticipation. It is a scheme that makes sense of the situation of the person in the limited circumstances of a particular point in time. It doesn't require that the individual have a comprehensive grasp of the whole -- the many contingencies that will arise, the balancing of goods that need to be adjusted in thought over the whole of the journey, the tradeoffs that are demanded across multiple activities and outcomes, and the specifics of the destination. And yet it permits the person to travel through life by making choices that conform in important ways to the high-level conception that guides him or her. And somehow, it brings to mind the philosophy of life offered by those great philosophers of life, Montaigne and Lucretius.

A fresh approach to life plans

There isn't a clear philosophy of life-planning in the literature. So let's start from scratch. What do we need in order to make a plan for any temporally extended project?

• An assessment of the outcomes we want to bring about
• An assessment of the likely workings of the natural and social environment in which action will occur
• A theory about how to achieve those outcomes -- strategy and tactics
• An assessment of the likelihood of negative interactions among various aspects of the plan
• An assessment of the riskiness of the environment
• A backup plan if things go off the rails -- plan B!

We would like to arrive at a plan that has a high probability of success, and one for which there are soft landings available when future expectations are not fulfilled. If my goal is to become a symphony conductor but I also know that the qualifications needed would equally qualify me to be a performer, and if performing itself is an agreeable outcome, then aiming at conductor is less risky.

We know what it is to be rational about limited choices like choosing a new car, picking a vacation destination, or investing retirement savings. Each of these decisions falls within a broad degree of certainty of assumptions for us: we know that we enjoy the beach more than the opera, that we want a fair degree of security in our retirement accounts, or that we need a car that is good in wet weather. That is to say, we know a lot about our tastes, our future needs, and our current circumstances. So small-gauge choices like these depend fairly simply on locating a solution that serves our tastes and preferences in our current and near-future circumstances. With these conditions fixed, we can then go about the information gathering that allows us to assess how well the available sets of alternatives serve our tastes, needs, and circumstances.

Sometimes we can even reduce our choice situations to a simple set of cost-benefit tradeoffs: I'll get a 20% improvement in crash-worthiness by paying an additional $10,000 for the car I choose; I'll have a chance on a 10% annual return on an investment if I accept a greater degree of risk; etc. And I might find that I like the tradeoff for one set of costs but not for another -- more safety is worth $10,000 to me but not $50,000. Or I will accept the greater investment risk when it means moving from 1% chance of losing everything to a 3% chance, but not to a 10% chance.

A life plan isn't like this, however. Consider the space of choices that confronts the 20-year old college student Miguel: what kind of work will satisfy me over the long term? How much importance will I attribute to higher income in twenty years? Do I want to have a spouse and children? How much time do I want to devote to family? Do I want to live in a city or the countryside? How important to me is integrity and consistency with my own values over time? These kinds of questions are difficult to answer in part because they don't yet have answers. Miguel will become a person with a set of important values and commitments; but right now he is somewhat plastic. It is possible for him to change his preferences, tastes, values, and concerns over time. So perhaps his plan needs to take these kinds of interventions into account.

Another source of uncertainty has to do with the future of the world itself. Will the economy continue to provide decent opportunities for young people, or will income stratification continue to increase? Will climate change make some parts of the world much more difficult for survival? Will religious strife worsen so that safety is very difficult to achieve? Is Mary Poppins or William Gibson the better prognosticator of what the world will look like in thirty years? A plan that looks good in a Mary Poppins world may look much worse in the Sprawl (Gibson's anti-utopian city of the future).

And then there is the difficult question of akrasia -- weakness of the will. Can I successfully carry out my long term plans? Or will short term temptations make it impossible for me to sustain the discipline required to achieve my long term goals? (Somewhere Jon Elster looks at this problem as a collective action problem across stages of the self. Is this a reasonable approach?) For that matter, how much should future goods matter to me in the present?

It is worth asking whether life plans actually exist for anyone. Perhaps most people's lives take shape in a more contingent and event-driven way. Perhaps guided opportunism is the best we are likely to do: look at available opportunities at a given moment, pursue the opportunity that seems best or most pleasing at that point, and enjoy the journey. Or perhaps there are some higher-level directional rules of thumb -- "choose current options that will contribute in the long run to a higher level of X". In this scenario there is no overriding plan, just a series of local choices. This alternative is pretty convincing as a way of thinking about the full duration of a person's life, as any biographer is likely to attest.

Consider an analogy with the life of a city or state: decisions and policies are established at various points in time. These decisions contribute to the life course of the city; monuments established in 200 BCE continued to inform Roman life in 300 AD. But Rome was indeed not built in a day, and its eventual course was not envisaged or planned by any of its founders and leaders. A city's "life" is the complex resultant of deliberation at many points in time, struggle, and contingency. And perhaps this describes a person's life as well.

This point of view has a lot in common with Herbert Simon's 1957 concept of bounded rationality and satisficing rather than maximizing as a rule of rational decision-making (Models of Man). Instead of heroically attempting to plan for all contingencies over the full of one's life, a bounded approach would be to consider short periods and make choices over the opportunity sets available during those periods. And if we superimpose on these choices a higher-level set of goals to be achieved -- having time with family, living in conformity to one's moral or religious values, gaining a set of desired character traits -- then we might argue that this decision-making process will be biased towards outcomes that favor one's deeper values as well as one's short-term needs and interests.

This approach will not optimize choices over the full lifetime; but it may be the only approach that is feasible given the costs of information gathering and scenario assessment.

So what about a rational life plan? At this point the phrase seems inapropos to the situation of a person's relationship to his or her longterm "life". A life is more of a concatenation of a series of experiences, projects, accidents, contingencies -- not a planned artifact or painting or building. A life is not a novel, a television series, or a mural with an underlying storyboard in which each element has its place. And therefore it seems inapt to ask for a rational plan of life. Individuals make situated and bounded deliberative decisions about specific issues. But they don't plot out their lives in detail. 

What seems more credible is to ask for a framework of navigation, a set of compass points, and a general set of values and purposes which get invested through projects and activities. The idea of the bildungsroman seems more illuminating -- the idea of a young person taking shape through a series of challenging undertakings over time. Development, formation, values clarification, and the formation of character seem more true to what we might like to see in a good life than achieving a particular set of outcomes.

Where, then, do thinking and reasoning come into the picture? This is where Socrates and Montaigne seem to be relevant. They look at living as an opportunity for deepening self-knowledge and articulation of values and character. "To philosophize is to learn how to die" (Montaigne) and "The unexamined life is not worth living" (Socrates). The upshot of these aphorisms seems to be this: reasoning and philosophizing allow us to probe, question, and extend our values and the things we strive for. And having examined and probed, we are also in a position to assess and judge the actions and goals that are presented to us at various stages of life. How does a college major, a first job, a marriage, or a parenting challenge frame the future into which the young person develops? And how can practical reflection about one's current values help to give direction to the future choices he or she makes later in life? 

Practical rationality perhaps amounts to little more than this when it comes to constructing a life: to consider one's best understanding of the goods he or she cares most about, and acting in the present in ways that shape the journey towards a future that better embodies those goods for the person and his or her concerns.

Rational life plans

Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls agree: people ought to have rational plans of life to guide their everyday efforts and activities. But what is involved in being rational about one's plan of life? And really, what is a plan of life? Is it a sketch of a lifetime goal, along with some indications of the efforts that are currently thought to lead to this goal? Is it a blueprint for organizing one's thinking, actions, investments, time, resources, and character over time in order to bring about the intended goal? Or is it something more flexible that this? Did Walter White in Breaking Bad have a plan of life, either before and after his cancer diagnosis? Did Dostoevsky have a plan of life? How about Wagner or Whitman? Is it possible to be rational in making partial or full life plans? How have philosophers thought about this topic?

Planning means orchestrating one's activities over time in such a way as to bring about good outcomes over the full period. When a person plans for a renovation of his/her home, he or she considers the reasons for considering the renovation; the results to be achieved; the enhancements that would contribute to those results; the resources that are necessary to fund those enhancements; the amount of time that will be required for each of the sub-tasks; and so forth. With a good plan and a good execution, it is likely that a good outcome will be achieved: an improved residence that was accomplished within the budgeted time and resources available.

A plan of life is something larger than a plan for a house renovation, though it has some aspects in common. John Rawls was the philosopher in recent times who brought this idea into serious attention. The concept plays a crucial role within his theory of justice in A Theory of Justice. (Perhaps Aristotle is the ancient philosopher who had the greatest interest in this idea.) Rawls introduces the idea in the context of his discussion of primary goods.

The main idea is that a person's good is determined by what is for him the most rational long-term plan of life given reasonably favorable circumstances. A man is happy when he is more or less successfully [sic] in the way of carrying out this plan. To put it briefly, the good is the satisfaction of rational desire. We are to suppose, then, that each individual has a rational plan of life drawn up subject to the conditions that confront him. This plan is designed to permit the harmonious satisfaction of his interests. It schedules activities so that various desires can be fulfilled without interferences. It is arrived at by rejecting other plans that are either less likely to succeed or do not provide for such an inclusive attainment of aims. Given the alternatives available, a rational plan is one which cannot be improved upon; there is no other plan which, taking everything into account, would be preferable. (TJ 92-93)

Several things are noteworthy about this description. First, it involves scheduling activities so as to "harmoniously satisfy interests", which is paraphrased as "fulfilling desires without interferences". In other words, Rawls's account of a plan of life is a fairly shallow one in terms of the assumptions it makes about the person. It takes desires as fixed and then "plans" around them to ensure their optimal satisfaction. But there are other things that we might want to include in a plan of life: choices about one's enduring character, for example. And second, Rawls makes very heroic assumptions here by requiring that a rational plan of life is a uniquely best plan, an optimal plan, one which cannot be improved upon.

There is a very direct connection between planning and rationality. But, surprisingly, this connection has not been a strong topic of interest within philosophy. The most important exception is in the work of Michael Bratman, including his 1987 book, Intention, Plans and Practical Reason. Here are a few key ideas from Bratman's book:

Our need for plans concerning the future is rooted in two very general needs. We are rational agents, to some extent. For us this means in part that deliberation and, more generally, rational reflection help shape what we do. If, however, our actions were influenced only by deliberation at the time of action, the influence of such deliberation would be rather minimal. This is so because deliberation requires time and other limited resources, and there is an obvious limit to the extent to which one may successfully deliberate at the time of action. 2 So we need ways to allow deliberation and rational reflection to influence action beyond the present.

Second, we have pressing needs for coordination. To achieve complex goals I must coordinate my present and future activities. And I need also to coordinate my activities with yours. Anyone who has managed to write a lecture, pick up a book at the library, attend a committee meeting, and then pick up a child at school will be familiar with the former type of intra personal coordination. And anyone who has managed to arrange and participate in a committee meeting with several colleagues will be familiar with the latter sort of inter personal coordination. Of course, as the examples make clear, we are typically in need of both sorts of coordination; for we are both temporally extended and social agents. And as we all learn to our chagrin, neither sort of coordination happens effortlessly.
...

We do not, of course, promote coordination and extend the influence of deliberation by means of plans that specify, once and for all, everything we are to do in the future. Such total plans are obviously beyond our limits. Rather, we typically settle on plans that are partial and then fill them in as need be and as time goes by. This characteristic incompleteness of our plans is of the first importance. It creates the need for a kind of reasoning characteristic of planning agents: reasoning that takes initial, partial plans as given and aims at filling them in with specifications of appropriate means, preliminary steps, or just relatively more specific courses of action. (section 1.1)

Here Bratman makes the connection between deliberation, intentions, and planning explicit: planning permits the coordination of one's intentions over time. And in the final paragraph he correctly observes that there is no such thing as a complete plan for a topic; plans are created in order to be updated. (Notice, however, that this runs contrary to Rawls's assumption quoted above.)

Jonathan Baron also gives some attention to the role of planning in deliberative reasoning in Rationality and Intelligence. Here is a statement from Baron:

A good definition of happiness ... is the achievement of just these consequences, or, more precisely, the successful pursuit of a plan that is expected to lead to them .... If the world is at all predictable, rational plans and decisions will, on average, lead to better outcomes in this sense than will irrational ones. Luck, of course, may still intervene; a person might make the best decisions possible, but still be unhappy because things turned out badly. (RI 206)

There are several features of life that make it difficult to formulate a satisfactory theory of the formulation and assessment of rational life plans.

• The extended timeframe of the planning problem: formulating a plan in one's twenties that is intended to guide through the end of one's life in his or her nineties. 
• The fact of a person's plasticity. Features of character, personality, habit, taste, and preference are all subject to a degree of purposive change. So it would seem that these should be the object of rational deliberative planning as well. But it is hard to see how to do this. 
• The fact of the unpredictability of the external environment, both natural and social. 
• The difficulty of designing a plan that is robust through dramatic change within the person.
• The difficulty of incorporating possible future capabilities of changing the self and the body directly through genetic engineering.

These challenges make traditional rational-choice theory unpromising as a foundation for arriving at a theory of life planning. Traditional rational choice theory is designed around the assumption of exogenous and fixed preferences, the ability to assign utility to outcomes, and quantifiable knowledge of the likelihood of various outcomes. But the five factors mentioned here invalidate all these assumptions.

(Several earlier posts are relevant to this set of issues: link, link, link.)

Rationality over the long term

image: Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students

Millions of words have been written on the topic of rationality in action. Life involves choices. How should we choose between available alternatives? Where should I go to college? Which job should I accept? Should I buy a house or rent an apartment? How much time should I give my job in preference to my family? We would like to have reasons for choosing A over B; we would like to approach these choices "rationally."

These are all "one-off" choices, and rational choice theory has something like a formula to offer for the decider: gain the best knowledge available about the several courses of action; evaluate the costs, risks, and rewards of each alternative; and choose that alternative that produces the greatest expected level of satisfaction of your preferences. There are nuances to be decided, of course: should we go for "greatest expected utility" or should we protect against unlikely but terrible outcomes by using a maximin rule for deciding?

There are several deficiencies in this story. Most obviously, few of us actually go through the kinds of calculations specified here. We often act out of habit or semi-articulated rules of thumb. Moreover, we are often concerned about factors that don't fit into the "preferences and beliefs" framework, like moral commitments, conceptions of ourselves, loyalties to others, and the like. Pragmatists would add that much mundane action flows from a combination of habit and creativity rather than formal calculation of costs and benefits.

But my concern here is larger. What is involved in being deliberative and purposive about extended stretches of time? How do we lay out the guideposts of a life plan? And what is involved in acting deliberatively and purposively in carrying out one's life plan or other medium- and long-term goals?

Here I want to look more closely than usual at what is involved in reflecting on one's purposes and values, formulating a plan for the medium or long term, and acting in the short term in ways that further the big plan. My topic is "rationality in action", but I want to pay attention to the issues associated with large, extended purposes -- not bounded decisions like buying a house, making a financial investment, or choosing a college. I'm thinking of larger subjects for deliberation -- for example, conquering all of Europe (Napoleon), leading the United States through a war for the Union ( Lincoln), or becoming a committed and active anti-Nazi (Bonhoeffer).

The scale I'm focusing on here corresponds to questions like these:

• How did Napoleon deliberate about his ambitions in 1789? How did he carry out his thoughts, goals, and plans?
• How did Abraham Lincoln think about slavery and the Union in 1861? How did his conduct of politics and war take shape in relation to his long term goals?
• How did Richard Rorty plan his career in the early years? How did his choices reflect those plans? (Neil Gross considers this question in Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher; link.)
• How did Dietrich Bonhoeffer deliberate about the choices in front of him in Germany in 1933? How did he decide to become an engaged anti-Nazi, at the eventual cost of his life?

What these examples have in common is large temporal scope; substantial uncertainties about the future; and extensive intertwining of moral and political values with more immediate concerns of self-interest, prudence, and desire. Moreover, the act of formulating plans on this scale and living them out is formative: we become different persons through these efforts.

The intriguing question for me at the moment is the issue of rational deliberation: to what extent and through what processes can individuals engage in a rational process in thinking through their decisions and plans at this level? Is it an expectation of rationality that an individual will have composed nested sets of plans and objectives, from the most global to the intermediate to the local?

Or instead, does a person's journey through large events take its shape in a more stochastic way: opportunities, short term decisions, chance involvements, and some ongoing efforts to make sense of it all in the form of a developing narrative? Here we might say that life is not planned, but rather built like Neurath's raft with materials at hand; and that rationality and deliberation come in only at a more local scale.

Here is a simple way of characterizing purposive action over a long and complex period. The actor has certain guiding goals he or she is trying to advance. It is possible to reflect upon these goals in depth and to consider their compatibility with other important considerations. This might be called "goal deliberation". These goals and values serve as the guiding landmarks for the journey -- "keep moving towards the tallest mountain on the horizon". The actor surveys the medium-term environment for actions that are available to him or her, and the changes in the environment that may be looming in that period. And he or she composes a plan for these circumstances-- "attempt to keep moderate Southern leaders from supporting cecession". This is the stage of formulation of mid-range strategies and tactics, designed to move the overall purposes forward. Finally, like Odysseus, the actor seizes unforeseen opportunities of the moment in ways that appear to advance the cause even lacking a blueprint for how to proceed.

We might describe this process as one that involves local action-rationality guided by medium term strategies and oriented towards long term objectives. Rationality comes into the story at several points: assessing cause and effect, weighing the importance of various long term goals, deliberating across conflicting goals and values, working out the consequences of one scenario or another, etc.

As biologists from Darwin to Dawkins have recognized, the process of species evolution through natural selection is inherently myopic. Long term intelligent action is not so, in that it is possible for intelligent actors to consider distant solutions that are potentially achievable through orchestrated series of actions -- plans and strategies. But in order to achieve the benefits of intelligent longterm action, it is necessary to be intelligent at every stage -- formulate good and appropriate distant goals, carefully assess the terrain of action to determine as well as possible what pathways exist to move toward those goals, and act in the moment in ways that are both intelligent solutions to immediate opportunities and obstacles, and have the discipline to forego short term gain in order to stay on the path to the long term goal. But, paradoxically, it may be possible to be locally rational at every step and yet globally irrational, in the sense that the series of rational choices lead to an outcome widely divergent from the overriding goals one has selected.

I've invoked a number of different ideas here, all contributing to the notion of rational action over an extended time: deliberation, purposiveness, reflection, calculation of consequences, intelligent problem solving, and rational choice among discrete alternatives. What is interesting to me is that each these activities is plainly relevant to the task of "rational action"; and yet none reduces to the other. In particular, rational choice theory cannot be construed as a general and complete answer to the question, "what is involved in acting rationally over the long term?".

Michael Bratman is the philosopher who has thought about these issues the most deeply; Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Manuel Vargas and Gideon Yaffe's recent festschrift on Bratman's work, Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman, is also a useful contribution on the subject. Sarah Paul provides a nice review of Rational and Social Agency here.

Heuristics for a mechanisms-based methodology

Let’s imagine that I’m a young sociologist or political scientist who has gotten interested in the social-mechanisms debates, and I’d like to frame my next research project around a set of heuristics that are suggested by the mechanisms approach. What might some of those heuristics look like? What is a "mechanisms-based methodology" for sociological research? And how would my research play out in concrete terms? Here are a few heuristics we might consider.

1. Identify one or more clear cases of the phenomenon I’m interested in understanding
2. Gain enough empirical detail about the cases to permit close examination of possible causal linkages
3. Acquaint myself with a broad range of social mechanisms from a range of the social sciences (political science, economics, anthropology, public choice theory, critical race studies, women’s studies, …)
4. Attempt to segment the phenomena into manageable components that may admit of separate study and analysis
5. Use the method of process-tracing to attempt to establish what appear to be causal linkages among the phenomena
6. Use my imagination and puzzle-solving ability to attempt to fit one or more of the available mechanisms into the phenomena I observe
7. Engage in quasi-experimental reasoning to probe the resulting analysis: if mechanism M is involved, what other effects would we expect to be present as well? Do the empirical realities of the case fit these hypothetical expectations?

These heuristics represent in a rough-and-ready way the idea that there are some well understood social processes in the world that have been explored in a lot of empirical and theoretical detail. The social sciences collectively provide a very rich toolbox of mechanisms that researchers have investigated and validated. We know how these mechanisms work, and we can observe them in a range of settings. This is a realist observation: the social world is not infinitely variable, and there is a substrate of activity, action, and interaction whose workings give rise to a number of well understood mechanisms. Here I would include free rider problems, contagion, provocation, escalation, coercion, and log-rolling as a very miscellaneous set of exemplars. So if we choose to pursue a mechanisms-based methodology, we are basically following a very basic intuition of realism by asking the question, "how does this social phenomenon work in the settings in which we find it?".

So how might a research project unfold if we adopt heuristics like these? Here is a striking example of a mechanisms approach within new-institutionalist research, Jean Ensminger's account of bridewealth in the cattle-herding culture of Kenya (Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society). First, some background. The cattle-herding economic regime of the Orma pastoralists of Kenya underwent substantial changes in the 1970s and 1980s. Commons grazing practices began to give way to restricted pasturage; wage labor among herders came to replace familial and patron-client relations; and a whole series of changes in the property system surrounding the cattle economy transpired as well. This is an excellent example for empirical study from a new-institutionalist perspective. What explained the particular configuration of norms and institutions of the earlier period? And what social pressures led to the transition towards a more impersonal relationship between owners and herders? These are questions about social causation at multiple levels.

Ensminger examines these questions from the perspective of the new institutionalism. Building on the theoretical frameworks of Douglass North and others, she undertakes to provide an analysis of the workings of traditional Orma cattle-management practices and an explanation of the process of change and dissolution that these practices underwent in the decades following 1960. The book puts forward a combination of close ethnographic detail and sophisticated use of theoretical ideas to explain complex local phenomena.

How does the new institutionalism approach help to explain the features of the traditional Orma cattle regime identified by Ensminger’s study? The key institutions in the earlier period are the terms of employment of cattle herders in mobile cattle camps. The traditional employment practice takes the pattern of an embroidered patron-client relation. The cattle owner provides a basic wage contract to the herder (food, clothing, and one head of cattle per year). The good herder is treated paternally, with additional “gifts” at the end of the season (additional clothing, an additional animal, and payment of the herder’s bridewealth after years of service). The relation between patron and client is multi-stranded, enduring, and paternal.

Ensminger understands this traditional practice as a solution to an obvious problem associated with mobile cattle camps, which is fundamentally a principal-agent problem. Supervision costs are very high, since the owner does not travel with the camp. The owner must depend on the herder to use his skill and diligence in a variety of difficult circumstances—rescuing stranded cattle, searching out lost animals, and maintaining control of the herd during harsh conditions. There are obvious short-term incentives and opportunities for the herder to cheat the employer—e.g. allowing stranded animals to perish, giving up on searches for lost animals, or even selling animals during times of distress. The patron-client relation is one possible solution to this principal-agent problem. An embedded patron-client relation gives the herder a long-term incentive to provide high-quality labor, for the quality of work can be assessed at the end of the season by assessment of the health and size of the herd. The patron has an incentive to cheat the client—e.g. by refusing to pay the herder’s bridewealth after years of service. But here the patron’s interest in reputation comes into play: a cattle owner with a reputation for cheating his clients will find it difficult to recruit high-quality herders.

This account serves to explain the evolution and persistence of the patron-client relation in cattle-camps on the basis of transaction costs (costs of supervision). Arrangements will be selected that serve to minimize transaction costs. In the circumstances of traditional cattle-rearing among the Orma the transaction costs of a straight wage-labor system are substantially greater than those associated with a patron-client system. Therefore the patron-client system is selected.

This analysis identifies mechanisms at two levels. First, the patron-client relation is the mechanism through which the endemic principal-agent problem facing cattle owners is solved. The normal workings of this relation give both patron and client a set of incentives that leads to a stable labor relation. The higher-level mechanism is somewhat less explicit, but is needed for the explanation to fully satisfy us. This is the mechanism through which the new social relationship (patron-client interdependency) is introduced and sustained. It may be the result of conscious institutional design or it may be a random variation in social space that is emulated when owners and herders notice the advantages it brings. Towards the end of the account we are led to inquire about another higher-level mechanism, the processes through which the traditional arrangement is eroded and replaced by short-term labor contracts.

This framework also illustrates the seventh heuristic above, the use of counterfactual reasoning. This account would suggest that if transaction costs change substantially (through improved transportation, for example, or through the creation of fixed grazing areas), that the terms of employment would change as well (in the direction of less costly pure wage-labor contracts). And in fact this is what Ensminger finds among the Orma. When villages begin to establish “restricted grazing areas” in the environs of the village, it is feasible for cattle owners to directly supervise the management of their herds; and in these circumstances Ensminger finds an increase in pure wage labor contracts.

What are the scientific achievements of this account? There are several. First, it takes a complicated and detailed case of collective behavior and it makes sense of the case. It illuminates the factors that influence choices by the various participants. Second, it provides insight into how these social transactions work (the mechanisms that are embodied in the story). Third, it begins to answer -- or at least to pose in a compelling way -- the question of the driving forces in institutional change. This too is a causal mechanism question; it is a question that focuses our attention on the concrete social processes that push one set of social behaviors and norms in the direction of another set of behaviors and norms. Finally, it is an empirically grounded account that gives us a basis for a degree of rational confidence in the findings. The case has the features that we should expect it to have if the mechanisms and processes in fact worked as they are described to do.

A final achievement of this account is very helpful in the context of our efforts to arrive at explanations of features of the social world. This is the fact that the account is logically independent of an effort to arrive at strong generalizations about behavior everywhere. The account that Ensminger provides is contextualized and specific, and it does not depend on the assumption that similar social problems will be solved in the same way in other contexts. There is no underlying assumption that this interesting set of institutional facts should be derivable from a general theory of behavior and institutions. Instead, the explanation is carefully crafted to identify the specific (and perhaps unique) features of the historical setting in which the phenomenon is observed.

(Here is a nice short article by David Collier on the logic of process-tracing; link. And here is an interesting piece by Aussems, Boomsma, and Snijders on the use of quasi-experimental methods in the social sciences; link.)

Peggy Somers' contribution to realism

Peggy Somers is an important contributor to the active field of sociological theory. And she identifies as a critical realist when it comes to understanding the logic and epistemology of the historical social sciences. Her views were extensively developed in “We’re no angels” (1998; link). The title picks up on the epistemology that she favors: non-perfectionist, anti-foundationalist, historically situated. In the essay she moves back and forth between post-Kuhnian philosophy of science and specific controversies in the methodology of the historical social sciences.

The essay takes its origin as a rebuttal to a critical review of the methodologies of historical sociology offered by Kiser and Hechter in “The role of general theory in comparative-historical sociology” (1991; link). A central target of Somers' arguments here is the idea defended by Kiser and Hechter that rational choice theory is the preferred theoretical framework for historical social science. Somers believes — as do most historical sociologists — that rational choice theory (RCT) is a legitimate but partial contribution to a pluralistic approach to historical sociology. Emphatically, it is too narrow a basis for constructing explanations of important large-scale historical movements and outcomes. So RCT advocates like Kiser and Hechter make the mistake of “theoretical monism” — imagining that a single theoretical premise might be sufficient to explain a large, complex domain of social phenomena.

A key theme in Somers’ treatment here is a contrast among several kinds of realism. Here is Somers' brief description:

All versions of realism accept that causal mechanisms—despite being unobservable—must be used as the basis of explanatory theoretical accounts; but only rational choice realism generates those mechanisms using on “ontic methodology” (Salmon 1984) in which the causal mechanisms of social explanation are postulated a priori from the same general theory that “guides” their research. (726)

And here are some key examples of what she means by causal mechanisms in the social world: "price mechanisms, maximizing preferences, class consciousness, value-driven intentionality, or domination" (726).

Somers identifies at least two kinds of realism -- what she calls "theoretical realism" and "relational and pragmatic realism". She favors the latter:

Relational realism posits that belief in the causal power of unobservables—such as states, markets, or social classes—does not depend on the rationality or truth of any given theory but upon practical evidence of its causal impact on the relationships in which it is embedded.... Relational realists believe that, while it is justifiable to theorize about unobservables, any particular theory entailing theoretical phenomena is historically provisional. For relational realism that means one can believe in the reality of a phenomenon without necessarily believing in the absolute truth or ultimate reality of any single theory that claims to explain it. (743-44)

And she believes that the two realisms have very different epistemological backgrounds -- deductivist and pragmatist:

Where the two realisms differ, then, is that while theoretical realism attributes an ontological truth to the theoretical phenomenon (e.g., the theory of electrons or the theory of market equilibrium), relational realism focuses on the relational effect of the phenomenon itself (e.g., the impact of the hypothesized electron on its environment or of the hypothesized market forces on an observable outcome). (745)

The most basic criticism that Somers offers of Kiser and Hechter is their mono-theoretic deductivism -- their claim that rigorous social science requires deductive derivation of a given social outcome from a theoretical premise. It is the theory that is at the heart of the explanation, according to this view of methodology. But for Somers -- and in the relational, pragmatist version of realism that she favors -- the ontology comes first. We may not know exactly what an electron is in detail; but we know the reality of electricity by the effects and causal properties we can probe practically and experimentally. This is the pragmatic aspect of her favored realism:

Social phenomena endure; but the “theoretical entities” that have purported to explain them are socially constructed—some more convincingly than others because they are more pragmatic and relational.

Somers faults what she calls theoretical realism for its commitment to explanation and confirmation through the hypothetic-deductive method. So what are the chief characteristics of her preferred alternative?

First, relational realism is “minimalist” --

[Relational realism is] minimalist because it recognizes that the partial concept- dependence of social life puts limits on the general realist premise of the absolute mind-independent status of the social world; yet realist nonetheless, in contrast to hermeneutics or radical constructivism in that some degree of concept-dependence does not in any way subvert the premise of a social world that exists independently of our beliefs about it. (766)

This amounts to an anti-foundationalist epistemology: we cannot establish the truth of all the premises and presuppositions of an explanation.

Second, relational realism is pluralistic; it encourages the discovery of multiple causal factors within a complex circumstance. This is in opposition to the theoretical monism of RCT supporters and is consistent with Robert Merton’s advocacy of a social science based on a search for theories of the middle range (link).

Third, relational realism is anti-essentialist; it recommends that the researcher should look at the social world as consisting of shifting configurations of social actors and institutions.

A relational ontology thus follows Popper’s rejection of essentialism and instead looks at the basic units of the social world as relational identities constituted in relational configurations. In place of a language of essences and inherent causal properties, a relational realism substitutes a language of networks and relationships that are not predetermined but made the indeterminate objects of investigation. (767)

An earlier post here raised a rather similar question about several kinds of realism, and the conclusions I reached were somewhat parallel as well. I offered support for scientific realism over critical realism. Here is the crucial passage:

So when we postulate that "class" is an important entity or structure in the modern world, our evidence for this claim is not largely based on inference to the best explanation and the overall success of class theory; it is instead the bundle of concrete researches that have been performed to identify, specify, and investigate the workings of class. Conceptual specification is more important that theoretical articulation and deduction: we need to know what a given researcher means to encompass in his or her use of the term "class structure". To take the photo above of Eton boys as an example -- what inferences can we draw about class from the photo? And what do we mean when we say that it illustrates an important social reality in the Britain of the 1930s, the reality of class? Is it a fact about attitudes; about the mechanisms of opportunity and selection; about the differential assignment of privilege; about modes of speech and thought?

My own philosophy of social science has several key features:

1. I look at social science as inherently eclectic and pluralistic. There is no "best" method or "most fundamental" theory.
2. I strongly suspect that social causation is fundamentally heterogeneous over multiple kinds of mechanisms and multiple temporalities. Outcomes are conjunctural, compositional, and contingent.
3. I place a great deal of importance on empirical research and discovery. I am in that particular regard an enlightened "empiricist" about social and historical knowledge.
4. I think there is an important place for theory and hypotheses in the social sciences. These need to be "theories of the middle range."
5. I take an actor-centered approach to social theorizing. The substrate of the social world is individuals doing and thinking a range of things in various social settings.
6. I am realist about a raft of social things: institutions, practices, value communities, social networks. All these social entities and structures exist as embodied in the thinking and acting of the socially constructed individuals who make them up, but they often have persistent and knowable properties that do not call for reduction to the micro level.
7. I am realist about social causation, and I understand causation in terms of mechanisms.
8. I am realist about the causal properties of at least some social entities -- structures, organizations, knowledge systems.
9. I think ontology is important, but primarily at the level of the ontological assumptions implicated in various areas of scientific and historical research. Universal or philosophical ontology does not seem so important to me.

These commitments add up to a form of realism; but it isn't critical realism in the technical or substantive senses. It is a realism of a different stripe -- a pragmatic realism, a galilean realism, a scientific realism.

I wonder which of these premises Somers would endorse, and which she would criticize? I suspect that premise (5) will make her uneasy, given her desire to emphasize relationality in the social world; but that is certainly not ruled out in an actor-centered approach to social research. (This was also a contrast that Chuck Tilly drew between his approach to the social world and mine: "Dan, your approach is more individualistic than mine. I prefer to emphasize relations among the actors!")

Strategic action fields

Sometimes a rethinking of ontology and social categories results in an important step forward in social theory. This appears to be the case in some recent reflections on the relationships that exist between social movements theory and the sociology of organizations.  The presumption of existing writings on these fields is that they refer to separate but related phenomena.  One is more about social actors and the other is more about stable social structures.  What happens when we consider the possibility that they actually refer to the same kinds of social phenomena?

This is the perspective taken by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam in a recent contribution to Sociological Theory, "Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields"(link). (They develop these ideas more fully in A Theory of Fields.) In the Sociological Theory article they write:

We assert that scholars of organizations and social movements -- and for that matter, students of any institutional actor in modern society -- are interested in the same underlying phenomenon: collective strategic action. (2)

Fligstein and McAdam formulate their novel approach in terms of the idea of "strategic action fields." They put it forward that "strategic action fields … are the fundamental units of collective action in society" (3). Power and advantage play key roles in their construction: "We too see SAFs as socially constructed arenas within which actors with varying resource endowments vie for advantage. Membership in these fields is based far more on subjective 'standing' than objective criteria" (3).

Here are types of social items they include in this theory:

1. strategic action fields 
2. incumbents, challengers, and governance units 
3. social skill 
4. the broader field environment 
5. exogenous shocks, field ruptures, and the onset of contention 
6. episodes of contention 
7. settlement (2) 

This approach is importantly couched at the level of social ontology: what sorts of things should we identify and analyze as explanatory factors in our theories? The move to SAFs is a move against the idea of the fixity of social "structures," institutions, and organizations. For example, they write against the ontology of new institutionalism: "The general image for most new institutionalists is one of routine social order and reproduction" -- or in other words, a static set of rules and constraints within which action takes place. Their ontology, on the other hand, emphasizes the fluidity of the constraints and circumstances of action from the actors' points of view; so the field shifts as actors undertake one set of strategies or another. "This leaves great latitude for the possibility of piecemeal change in the positions that actors occupy" (5).

So both stability and change are incorporated into a single framework of analysis: actors react strategically to the field of constraints and positions within which they act, with results that sometimes reinforce current positions and other times disrupt those positions.

They account for what looks like institutional rigidity by calling out the power of some actors to maintain their positions in the social order: "Most incumbents are generally well positioned and fortified to withstand these change pressures. For starters they typically enjoy significant resource advantages over field challengers" (9). But institutions should not be expected to maintain their structures indefinitely: "The expectation is that when even a single member of the field begins to act in innovative ways in violation of field rules, others will respond in kind, precipitating an episode of contention" (9).

So what is intended by the idea of "strategic action" in this theory? Here is what they have to say on that subject:

We define strategic action as the attempt by social actors to create and maintain stable social worlds by securing the cooperation of others. Strategic action is about control in a given context. The creation of identities, political coalitions, and interests serves to promote the control of actors vis-a-vis other actors. (7)

Here is one other interesting ontological feature of this approach. Their language suggests some parallels with assemblage theory (link), in the sense that social constructs fit upwards and downwards into strategic action fields at a range of fields. "We conceive of all fields as embedded in complex webs of other fields" (8). This set of ideas seems to suggest an unexpected affinity to "actor-network theory" and the sociological ideas of Bruno Latour (ANT) (link). But at the other end of some obscure spectrum of theory differentiation, their account also seems to rub shoulders with rational-choice theory, where both actions and rules are subject to deliberation and change by prudential actors.

There are several features of this approach that seem promising to me. One is the fact that it directly challenges the tendency towards reification that sometimes blocks sociological thinking -- the idea that social "things" like states persist largely independently from the individuals who make them up. This new approach leads to a way of thinking about the social world that emphasizes contingency and plasticity (link, link) rather than rigid and homogeneous social structures. It also seems consistent with the thinking that leads to the idea of "methodological localism" -- the idea that social phenomena rest upon "molecules" of socially constructed, socially situated individuals (link). I also like the fact that their analysis is explicitly couched at the meso level -- neither macro nor micro.

One concern this approach raises, however, is suggested by the point mentioned above about its apparent proximity to some versions of rational choice theory -- the view that all social outcomes and processes are ultimately the consequence of prudential actors pursuing their interests. But this assumption -- which McAdam certainly does not share elsewhere in his writing (e.g. Dynamics of Contention) -- threatens to push out of consideration social realities like normative systems, social identities, and distributed systems of power that somehow or other seem to demand inclusion in our understanding of social processes.

Finally, we can ask whether this innovation provides a basis for more fruitful empirical research into concrete phenomena like how corporations and revolutionary parties function, how demonstrations against Islamophobia take shape, and how resistance to racial discrimination emerges.  If the theoretical innovation doesn't lead to richer empirical research, then it is reasonable to be skeptical about why we should adopt the new theoretical tools.