Explaining Social Behavior

Elster's book is a graduate-level statement of how social science explanation should work. His central position is that the social sciences have laws that are too weak to be useful and that the proper unit of explanation is the mechanism, meaning a frequently occurring and easily recognisable causal pattern that is triggered under generally unknown conditions and with indeterminate consequences.

He builds up from the individual: desires, beliefs, emotions, and the ways each is formed and distorted. He covers rational choice theory carefully and then sets out its limits, arguing that rationality is often indeterminate because the agent cannot know what information to gather, and that people frequently act on norms, emotions or self-deception instead. His treatment of emotions is unusually detailed for a methodology book, and he insists that emotions have cognitive antecedents and behavioural consequences that can be specified. The later sections cover interaction, collective action, aggregation, social norms and institutions.

Elster is severe about the state of his own field. He attacks what he calls soft obscurantism in interpretive social science and hard obscurantism in formal modelling and rational choice, arguing that a great deal of published work in economics and political science consists of models whose assumptions are chosen for tractability and whose conclusions are unfalsifiable. For investors and operators the useful content is the mechanism approach, which is a disciplined way of explaining behaviour without pretending to predict it, and the catalogue of specific mechanisms. The book is dense and demanding, and Elster's judgements about entire literatures are stated more forcefully than he defends them.