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Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, by Jon Elster
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This book, first published in 2007, is an expanded and revised edition of the author's critically acclaimed volume Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. In twenty-six succinct chapters, Jon Elster provides an account of the nature of explanation in the social sciences. He offers an overview of key explanatory mechanisms in the social sciences, relying on hundreds of examples and drawing on a large variety of sources - psychology, behavioral economics, biology, political science, historical writings, philosophy and fiction. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, Elster aims at accuracy and clarity while eschewing formal models. In a provocative conclusion, Elster defends the centrality of qualitative social sciences in a two-front war against soft (literary) and hard (mathematical) forms of obscurantism.
- Sales Rank: #278657 in eBooks
- Published on: 2007-04-30
- Released on: 2007-04-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"...contains many interesting puzzles and examples, and excellent elementary discussions of the major concepts of the social sciences...a treasure trove of suitable and interesting case-studies and examples..." --Dean Rickles, University of Sydney: Philosophy in Review
About the Author
Jon Elster is Professor and Chaire de Rationalite et Sciences Sociales at the College de France. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, he is a recipient of fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, among many others. Dr Elster has taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University and has held visiting professorships at many universities in the United States and in Europe. He is the author and editor of thirty-four books, most recently Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective, Elementary Social Science from an Advanced Standpoint, and Retribution and Restitution in the Transition to Democracy.
Most helpful customer reviews
65 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
Simply the best: read it at least twice
By N N Taleb
I read this book twice. The first time, I thought that it was excellent, the best compendium of ideas of social science by arguably the best thinker in the field. I took copious notes, etc. I agreed with its patchwork-style approach to rational decision making. I knew that it had huge insights applicable to my refusal of general theories [they don't work], rather limit ourselves to nuts and bolts [they work].
Then I started reading it again, as the book tends to locate itself by my bedside and sneaks itself in my suitcase when I go on a trip. It is as if the book wanted me to read it. It is what literature does to you when it is at its best. So I realized why: it had another layer of depth --and the author distilled ideas from the works of Proust, La Rochefoucault, Tocqueville, Montaigne, people with the kind of insights that extend beyond the ideas, and that makes you feel that a reductionist academic treatment of the subject will necessary distort it [& somehow Elster managed to combine Montaigne and Kahneman-Tversky]. So as an anti-Platonist I finally found a rigorous treatment of human nature that is not Platonistic --not academic (in the bad sense of the word).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
55 of 57 people found the following review helpful.
An amazing vision of the whole of social science
By Aaron Swartz
For the past forty years, Jon Elster has attempted to explain things ranging from the emotions to technological change. The result is dozens of books (and even more papers) in three languages across four universities. And throughout, his work has not just been exemplary social science, but has always struggled with the question of what social science _should be_ -- what kinds of explanations are legitimate, which techniques should be used, and so on.
As he reaches his late sixties, it is understandable if he begins to think of his legacy. That certainly would help explain his latest book, _Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences_ (Cambridge University Press, 2007), a 500-page masterpiece that I expect will be seen as the summation of a brilliant career.
It's a book unlike any other and, as a result, unless read from start to finish can seem bizarre, if only because one has little sense of what the book is trying to do. It is not a guidebook, or a textbook, or a piece of social science in itself. In short, it is nothing less than an attempt to summarize an idealized vision of the whole of social science in simple language.
The book's foundational assumption (as implied by its title) is that the goal of social science is to discover explanations for social phenomena. It begins by describing what explanations are and discussing their different forms. But the bulk of the book consists of tools that can be used in explanations: emotions, norms, time discounting, weakness of will, magical thinking, cognitive dissonance, heuristics and biases, rationality, irrationality, neuroscience, evolution, externalities, game theory, pluralistic ignorance, informational cascades, collective action, cyclical preferences, institutions, etc. -- in short, the entire toolkit of the social sciences.
Just as amazing as the breadth topics is the way in which they're covered. Elster explains each phenomenon clearly and concisely, so that any educated reader can understand them with little effort, without ever sacrificing intellectual depth. His explanations are peppered with examples from an amazing variety of sources: ancient history, recent history, personal experience, the classics of social science (e.g. Tocqueville), the great philosophers (Montaigne, Pascal, Mill), and classic novelists (e.g. Proust). The result is a book which not just introduces readers to the discoveries of the social sciences but to the intellectual world as a whole. Bibliographical notes following each chapter as well as the conclusion provide a rich guide for further exploration.
And yet it's not simply a compendium of interesting results in the social sciences, but attempts to defend a particular conception of what the social sciences should be. In the conclusion, Elster defends his notion of social science as the attempt to discover particular explanations for particular phenomena against the "soft obscurantism" of the literary theorists and the "hard obscurantism" of the economists. As part of this, he turns his back on the notion of rational-choice models being an explanation in themselves, noting that their many assumptions are in desperate need of empirical defense.
In response to an earlier draft of this review, Elster wrote "I'm glad you appreciate the details in my book, but you're missing the big picture, which is that there isn't any." Instead of trying to build a Grand Theory which explains all of social life, we should try to build explanations of particular phenomena from the nuts and bolts we have lying around. And "even if a dominant explanation of a given event or episode is discarded and then resurrected, the building blocks or mechanisms at work in the discarding and resurrection remain. The repertory, or the size of the toolbox, does not shrink."
For anyone who cares about social science, Elster has done an amazing service in clearly describing the toolbox's contents and defending its importance.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Rich and Provocative, but not always Correct
By Herbert Gintis
Jon Elster's strength is his deep understanding of behavioral science as well as the classical writers on human nature and human society. In the past several years, his goal has been to join the two, throwing in the natural sciences, to explain more fully the nature of society. He says (p. 246) "In a common view, the scientific enterprise has three distincti parts or branches: the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences...but...a rigid distinction may prefent cross-fertilization...the social sciences can benefit from the biological study of human beings and other animals...interpretation of works of art and explanation are closely related enterprises." I think he is largely successful, and that this is a very useful approach for humanists and social scientists (although not for natural scientists). The number of insights per page in this book is prodigious, and it should be widely read.
I have several criticisms of Elster's exposition. In part, our differences may have narrowed or disappeared, as this book was published in 2007 and doubtless written a few years before that.
Elster's treatment of altruism is very Kantian. An act is altruistic if it benefits another at a cost to oneself, and one was motivated to undertake the act in order to benefit the other person. This, I believe, is absurd. If I really care about another person's welfare, then it pleases me to help this person. It is in my self-interest to behave altruistically. Very often I use the term self-regarding rather that self-interested, precisely because a truly moral person has a self-interest in being other-regarding. Part of my satisfaction in performing the altruistic act is that so doing is morally right, and I get satisfaction from behaving in a morally correct manner. But it may not. I may think there is nothing especially moral about being helpful or considerate or loyal--it just gives me satisfaction. Similarly, I may punish bad acts of others not because I want to change society for the better, but because I am personally very angry at the behavior. If I scream at a bad driver on the road, I am not trying to improve his driving behavior; I am trying to make him feel bad, and I might not care a whit whether it affects his behavior.
Elster's treatment of rational choice is fquite knowledgeable and sophisticated. But he presents the theory in a manner that renders it empirically incorrect, and gives no way to improve upon it, except to talk about emotions and irrationality. Rational choice theory assumes agents have a subjective prior over the effect of their choices on outcomes (beliefs), a set of transitive, consistent preferences over outcomes (preferences), and the face constraints in making their choices (such as limited information and resources). A rather strong form, but which I think is generally acceptable, is that rational agents update their subjective prior using something equivalent to Bayes rule. That is all. Elster insists that "rational choice theorists want to explain behavior on the bare assumpton that agents are rational." (p. 191) This I call the fallacy of methodological individualism, which is rampant in economics, and is empirically false (see my book Bounds of Reason, Princeton 2009).
A stripped-down version of rational choice theory is both compatible with the facts, and extremely useful, as much of applied economics attests to. The main weakness of the theory, I believe, is the assumption that beliefs are personal (subjective prior), when in fact beliefs are generally the product of social linkages among complexly networked minds, and probabilities are resident in distributed cognition over this network. Elster's discussion of beliefs is again very rich, but he does not present the networked character of minds and the relationship of such networks or the formation and transformation of beliefs.
Elster's description of game theory is very useful and his suggested readings are excellent. However, he criticizes game theory for "predictive failures" (p.337), including behavior in finitely repeated games that are subject to analysis using backward induction. These games include the repeated prisoner's dilemma, the centipede game, and the traveler's dilemma. In all cases, backward induction gives a result that is very far from how people play the game. For instance, in the repeated prisoner's dilemma and the centipede game, backward induction says to defect on the first round, whereas in fact in a long game, people generally cooperate until near the very end of the game. However, the use of backward induction, while very common in game theory, cannot be justified by rationality alone. Rather, you need the common knowledge of rationality (CKR), which I believe is a very suspect epistemological condition---see Bounds of Reason, or the paper on CKR on my web site (under submission).
I think Elster should subject this book to a bit of rewriting, but meanwhile is is about the best book available on the topic.
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