1. Collective decision making, such as determining the level of public goods, differs from standard decision making within a household in two important ways. First, there is a problem of eliciting preferences. If the amount that individuals have to pay depends on their statements, they may tend to understate their true preferences. If the amount that individuals have to pay does not depend at all on their statements, they may tend to overstate their true preferences.
Rational choice theory also stipulates that all complex social phenomena are driven by individual human actions. It focuses on the choice to engage in crime. We must keep in mind bounded rationality in order to understand Rationality is constrained by the limits of time and ability and the availability of relevant information (Cullen, 2014 pg 439). You can easily link Rational Choice theory to the film Scarface. In this film Tony Montana (Al Pacino) calculates the pleasure and benefits he can obtain if he becomes a cocaine distributer.
What are the consequences of a particular choice? How may changes in decision-making environment affect choices?
Often many choices can be communicated and order to make a decision and avoid judgment (Weber & Johnson,
Rational behavior is not easy to achieve but it is possible. According to Charles Elder and Roger Cobb, “Rationality implies that political actions and evaluations are the product of consistent preferences, logical analysis, and abundant [unbiased] information. Irrationality, on the other hand presupposes that political actions and reactions are based on emotional impulses and blind prejudices that defy logic and that are insensitive to fact.” Elder and Cobb both compared the understanding of rational behavior and irrational behavior. Human beings are basically non-rational people.
The Importance of Rationality At often times one may believe that making decisions should be predominantly based upon what one may feel or desire, though in reality such process frequently results in negative consequences, thus why in the process of making decisions, love should not overtake rationality. When love is prioritized in decision making, it tends to cause thoughts that typically won’t better the situation for those who are involved, while rationality would instead provide the proper reasoning to create a suitable outcome. In the process of making decisions, love should not overtake rationality.
In the documentary, Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote the substantial study, An American Dilemma, believed that people are confused in their minds. I believe this to be attributed to the influence public opinion has in today’s society. Society has gotten to the point where superficial characteristics and money determine one’s social standing. The people with high social standings will say anything to stay with the public opinion. Furthermore, regular people agree with the public opinion because the people with power agree.
In “The Choice Explosion” by David Brooks, the author describes the state of decision-making skills and how they have affected life in recent years, specifically in America. Brooks begins with a description of a social psychology experiment on Japanese and American college students and the decisions they wanted to make for themselves. The results showed that the American students wanted to decide in four times more areas than the Japanese students. Brooks then makes the conclusion that this is the result of American individualism; this individualism has provided more choice and control over everyday life. However, the author also points out that arriving at good outcomes is no easy task, even for qualified decision makers.
According to Allison and Zelikow admit the deviancy saying “characterization of the rational actor’s choice in a world of uncertainty about estimated consequences of options requires further information or assumptions about the actors’ attitude toward risk.” Allison justifies the model saying people must use the Rational Actor Paradigm. It uses a “systematic statement of the basic assumptions, concepts, and propositions employed in the basic school of analysis”. In our example, the only known objective was to agree upon that a decision of some kind had to be made. The options on the table were increase law enforcement, create exclusion zones, mass deportation, internment, extermination, propaganda, encourage loyalty, full scale evacuation or simply do nothing.
Why do people commit crimes? What goes through their minds before they actually commit a crime? These are questions asked from society to criminologist every time one decides they want to commit a crime. Criminologists has given us different crime causations, theories, to explain the answer to these questions. A theory is a speculation about how phenomena, behavior, or process are caused and what takes place after the cause is determined (Anderson, 2015).
Analysis: Societies for centuries have searched for an answer to the enduring problem: “Who should rule us?” This question has been one of the central debates in political philosophy as well as in
Decision makers are no free agents making their own preferable choices rather we are coming from a social settings that informs its subjects about what is appropriate and important. In simple words, what we think comes out of our social condition. The Realist approach that man is power lusty seems, to be a miss-representation of Fear. In the wilderness of the international structure individuals feel insecure (constructing a social belief) against each other hence paving way for a holocaust.
In using the theory of preference utilitarianism, making decisions is much simpler. One does
The driving factor of decisions are evaluated through the intentions rather than the outcomes. Actions are classified into categories. Two of the most outstanding ones include universal law of humanity (categorical imperative) and principle of ends, which perceives that actions should be based in the end and never merely as a means (2011).
Many people believe that the election plays the most important role in democracy. Because a free and fair election holds the government responsible and forces it to behave on voter's interest. However, some scholars find evidence that election itself is not enough to hold politicians responsible if the institutions are not shaping incentives in a correct way. In other words, the role of the election on democracy, whether it helps to serve the interest of the public or specific groups, depends on other political institutions. I
