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Pros And Cons Of Rational Choice Theory

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Rational Choice Theory
There are many criminology theories about why individuals commit crimes. Some argue that crime is a learned behavior or even that individuals commit crime because they don’t have the means of achieving things, such as monetary success, so they commit crimes. A great theory as to why individuals commit crime would be rational choice theory, created in the late 1980s.
Rational choice theory is a perspective that holds that criminality is the result of conscious choice and that predicts that individuals choose to commit crime when the benefits outweigh the cost of disobeying the law (Schmalleger). Situational choice theory is an extension of rational choice theory because it's believed that one's behavior is always a choice and that if the opportunity presents …show more content…

Rogowski (1997) acknowledged the model as, “most rigorous and most general theory of social action that has been advanced in this century,” (Arabian Journal, 2013). Other pros of the rational choice theory include generality, parsimony, and predictive. Generality means that one set of assumptions relating to each type of actor in any circumstance, is compatible with any set of structural assumptions about the environmental setting in which the actor is present. Parsimony is common knowledge of rationality assumption. When it is combined with the rational optimization model it allows rational choice theories to treat variations in choices among actors and by an actor over time as entirely a function of their structural position. Assumptions of the rational choice model have been used to produce a wide variety of decisive theories, whose predictions about the measurable real world phenomena rule out a much larger set of outcomes than what is already generally accepted, which is where predictive comes from

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