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CHAPTER 6 Reduced Expectations This concluding chapter begins by stressing the coherent message underlying the variegated analysis ofthe preceding five chapters. My aim is part summary and part reorganization. The chapter will also extend the analysis by confronting one of the awkward complaints about rational choice theory raised by Donald Green and [an Shapiro (1994), namely, that its advocates do not really test the theory but tend to focus on favorable illustrations. Although the preceding analysis tackled some of the most troubling anomalies facing rational choice theory, including electoral mobilization and cooperation, and explored some important contemporary political phenomena, including ethnic politics, it too can be accused of selection bias. Clearly, I have picked the topics and examples about which I thought CEU theory has something interesting and worthwhile to say. For the most part, on the other hand, I have ignored many of the less directly political but persistent questions raised by cognitive psychologists about the appropriateness of the rationality assumption per se. Although profoundly different in some respects, CEU and EU theory are formally similar in so many other respects-especially when viewed from the outside-that these questions may seem to apply equally to both approaches. After all, they are both versions of rational choice theory. Accordingly, the many alleged failures of EU theory as a generic account of rational decision making, the way it models the use of probabilities for example, will appear to be failures ofCEU theory as well. Faced with attacks by psychologists, EU and CEU theory are in danger of winding up in the same foxhole. One task of this chapter is to separate them even further. Prominent rational choice theorists like Anatol Rapoport (1966) and R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa (1957) have argued that rational choice theory's failure as a realistic account of human psychology necessitates treating it as a normative theory. I have argued the converse. Rational choice theory's status as an empirical account of human behavior conflicts with its status as normative theory. Its empirical role preempts its normative role, which, given the place it assigns to choice, would be in trouble anyway. The less weight put on CEU theory's value as a normative theory, of course, the greater the pressure put on it to produce as a scientific theory. I therefore return to our original focus, CEU theory's scientific accomplish167 16X Choice-Free Rationality ments. It is in this context One encounters general empirical complaints about the rationality assumption, whether of the EU or CEU variety. The specific empirical claims of CEU theory are of course still important. Using CEU theory, the first chapter rationalizes voting and similar political acts that are often taken to be paradigmatic for modem democratic societies. The second chapter examines ethnic identity. Individuals around the world use historically and culturally salient schemas for classifying friends, neighbors, and countrymen into groups. Theorists have underestimated the importance of these schemas by assuming that ethnic categories piggyback on more fundamental concepts of class or even species. Ethnic classifications, I countered in chapter 2, help agents package crucial information about their social and political environment. In this role, they are part of the fundamental ideological inventory of rational agents. The third chapter develops a more general way to explore ideology and, in the process, engages those critics who question whether the rational choice assumption applies to the mass public. In so doing, this chapter challenges the commOn view that either nature or intersubjective agreement automatically specifies objects of choice as objects. Some ways of categorizing objects may be common to the species due to shared genes or sufficiently similar upbringing . But chapter 3's model of ideology emphasizes an agent-specific classification of objects. In this formulation, each classification establishes the categories out of which utility-relevant propositions are constructed. When evidence materializes concerning matters of interest to agents, they update their beliefs using the categories available to them. Yet different experiences, I hypothesize, lead not only to different conclusions within a category system but also prompt the varied elaboration and perhaps replacement of initial systems ofcategories, which at some level of abstraction and political relevance help constitute different ideologies. Using these divergent ideologies, rational agents continue to learn rationally. To the foreign observer, however, some ofthese agents will seem irrational. Historically, those with divergent ideologies have been dismissed as ideologues, nut cases, or both. In sum, armed with a conception of ideology, CEU theory links the information processing techniques of rational agents...

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