Social Rationality

The term social rationality covers a family of conceptions of goal-directed behavior that have one feature in common: they proceed from the assumption that each individual's ability to pursue goals more or less intelligently and the way goals are pursued (the mode of rationality) are strongly influenced by social conditions. This conception stands in contrast to “natural rationality” in which the individual's ability to pursue goals more or less intelligently is assumed to be naturally given and the same for all. The latter even holds for a great number of “bounded rationality” approaches in which human biases in judgment and limitations in calculatory ability are explicitly admitted. Important assumptions of the natural rationality approach include the veridicality of expectations, common knowledge (i.e., cognitive coordination) of interacting individuals, and ordered preferences as naturally given. All these assumptions are challenged by social rationality approaches.

Social rationality assumptions are quite old in sociology. For example, Simmel and Weber worked explicitly with such a conception. However, goal-directed behavior was sidelined in sociology for some time in favor or role-playing behavior, and economists used increasingly natural rationality conceptions, often as a simplifying assumption for the sake of tractability and deductive rigor. As a consequence, when sociologists began to pay more attention to goal-directed behavior again (in the 1970s), they often borrowed the conception of natural rationality from economics and game theory, which led to a predominance of natural rationality assumptions in “rational choice sociology” (with James Coleman as a major proponent). In the meantime, social rationality approaches have developed and begun to spread in sociology. There is no single dominant approach yet, but most of the approaches have learned a great deal from natural rationality approaches and from cognitive and evolutionary psychology. In that sense, they have evolved far beyond the beginnings in classical sociology.

A direct result of this difference in assumptions is that in the natural rationality approaches, social and cultural conditions can improve or diminish the joint goal pursuit (also called “collective” rationality or Pareto optimality) but not individual rationality. By contrast, for social rationality approaches, social and cultural conditions can affect positively or negatively both individual and collective rationality. This has important consequences for the kind of social arrangements (especially institutions) being considered and for the interdependence among these arrangements. For example, in social rationality approaches, humans are assumed to be forward looking, but they don't naturally look far into the future. The ability to consider the far future (often called “farsightedness” and “rational expectations” in natural rationality approaches) is thus assumed to depend on social arrangements that make it easy to do so by (1) standardizing events and (2) making it possible to predict classes of contingencies. A school system, for instance, and institutions that make it stable over time, allow parents to anticipate possible choices and contingencies far into their child's future. There is no “natural” farsightedness involved. Creating social arrangements for the improvement of collective rationality is often dependent on having arrangements for enhanced individual rationality in place. Institutional design for the improvement of collective rationality is an important task for sociology. However, it presupposes a high level of individual sensitivity to incentives and thus a high level of individual rationality that responds to changes in incentives. Yet contrary to the assumptions in natural rationality approaches, expectations are often not veridical, preferences are often not ordered, and there is no cognitive coordination. Thus, the social conditions under which expectations are more or less veridical, preferences are more or less ordered, and cognitions of interacting partners more or less coordinated must be investigated, and that is one of the tasks of social rationality approaches.

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