| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In studying social behavior, many scholars assume that people behave rationally, assuming that they choose among alternative actions by comparing the value of the likely outcomes, then selecting the one with the highest expected value. We call this approach rationality in action. Although it is a commonly used, and valuable, starting point for deductive modeling, most scholars do not believe that it comes close to actually modeling the real cognitive processes at work in human decision-making. Some argue that the truth value of the assumptions is not important, that their purpose is to produce testable predictions of social and economic outcomes. But that is not good enough for those of us who believe the social sciences should be integrated, rather than remaining apparently unrelated disciplines, and who want to develop empirically testable predictions that are based on empirically defendable assumptions about behavior. The problem is to find a model of human agency that is both defendable in light of actual human decision processes and simple enough to be a useful tool for building deductive models.
Through our research we have had a better model of human behavior generally, and, more specifically, understood why people cooperate and how they decide to do so.
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