What is rational choice? Green and Shapiro (1994) treat it as an empirically worthless but nonetheless highly pretentious theory. Shepsle (1995) treats it as the worst social scientific paradigm we have, except for all the rest. And I have elsewhere (Cox 1999) reduced it to game theory, called it a methodology, and analogized it to statistics – hence my title. In this essay, I consider rational choice both as a paradigm, identifying what I view as its “hard core,” and as a methodology, again reducing it to game theory and comparing it to econometrics.

Rational choice as a paradigm: behaviorism, rational choice, and cognitive choice

One way to locate rational choice theory is in terms of what it assumes about human psychology. Social science does not necessarily need to incorporate a full-blown theory of psychology, just as cell biology does not necessarily need to incorporate a full-blown theory of molecular interaction. However, if one does not need all the complexities that psychologists or cognitive scientists discern, what is the minimum one does need?

Radical behaviorism in social science would take the position that one can get by without any theory of psychology at all – and should do so since mental phenomena are inherently (or at least practically) unobservable, hence outside the purview of an empirically based science. Rational choice theory can be viewed as refining what philosophers call “folk psychology” (Ferejohn and Satz 1994b), the root idea of which is that actions are taken in light of beliefs to best satisfy desires.