A Pre-history of Rational Decision Theory. From Adam Smith to the First Experiments.

Abstract

How did we arrive at those formal norms of rationality of rational choice theory before Kahneman and Tversky's presentation of surprising discrepancies between the norms and the behavior of experimental subjects? Those norms developed in the hands of 19th-century philosophers and political economists who assumed their actuality instead of normativity This thesis is a crypto-genealogy of the rationality concept before it led to perplexities within the experimental space. The thesis describes this process as one of contingently ascribing the solution of multiple social order, political decidability, and economic equilibrium problems of the 19th century increasingly to the promising powers of the human rational device on the one hand and his physiology on the other, eschewing baffling extra-individual discussion and thought. The solution stood rather on the tentative and wishful investments in the sciences of the body and the mind with all the limitation thereof and rather drew strength from it is seemingly one-for-all character. Thus, before experimental psychologists started feeling confident to experiment with the rationality concept, the concept became so general and ascribed so much power to the mind that the psychologists had to constrain the experimental situation immensely as to get meaningful results, even when falsifying it.