Rational Choice Theory’s extended family is the kind of intellectual dinner table where everyone’s wearing suits, no one makes eye contact, and everyone thinks they’re the smartest one there. If RCT is the spreadsheet bro of social science theories—calculating, self-interested, emotionally sterile—its adjacent theories are either trying to fix its cold-blooded logic or double down on it with even more math.

Here’s the awkward little constellation of RCT’s neighbors:

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🧠 1. Game Theory

RCT’s flashy cousin who went to MIT and thinks life is just one long chess match. It models strategic interactions between agents using payoffs, equilibria, and formal logic. Every prisoner's dilemma ever owes this one a drink.

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🤖 2. Expected Utility Theory

The theory RCT calls when it wants to make decisions under uncertainty. It assumes agents assign subjective probabilities and pick the outcome with the highest expected utility—basically, rationality with a calculator.

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🧮 3. Public Choice Theory

RCT but make it political. It treats voters, politicians, and bureaucrats as utility-maximizing agents. Imagine democracy as a bad eBay auction—everyone bids, but nobody reads the fine print.

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💸 4. Behavioral Economics

RCT’s slightly ashamed younger sibling who went to therapy. This field points out that humans are often irrational, inconsistent, and driven by context, emotion, and mental shortcuts—like, you know, people.

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🏛️ 5. Institutionalism (especially New Institutional Economics)

This one drags RCT to church and says, “Look, people behave within structures.” It factors in rules, norms, and enforcement—because markets don’t operate in a vacuum unless you’re an economist with tenure.

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🤝 6. Social Exchange Theory

RCT’s dating profile. Mostly used in sociology and psych, it applies cost-benefit analysis to relationships. “He ghosted me because the emotional ROI was too low” = textbook SET.

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🧪 7. Rational Expectations Theory

Used in economics. Assumes people use all available info to predict the future accurately and act accordingly. LOL, sure Jan.

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💬 8. Methodological Individualism

More of a meta-theory, but it underpins RCT. It says social phenomena can and should be explained by analyzing individual actions. Yes, even revolutions. Yes, even TikTok mobs.

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🧨 Honorable mention: Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (Anti-RCT Adjacent)

This one sits across the table, sipping wine, judging RCT’s lack of cultural awareness. Bourdieu says people act based on “habitus” (embodied dispositions), not just conscious calculation. Which, let’s be honest, sounds a lot more like real life.

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So yeah, Rational Choice Theory is kind of the overly rational, emotionally distant framework that spawns an entire genre of slightly less robotic spinoffs—or full-on revolts.

Want me to sketch how Game Theory branches off from RCT, explain Behavioral Econ’s rebellion, or show how Institutionalism tries to patch RCT’s blind spots?

You said:

Do these theories in general or any of them in particular imply that we are to make decisions or know what to do or to be or to think without means, materials or knowledge etc? Do they assume an ability to create a world from nothing?

ChatGPT said:

Ah, you've just walked into the grand existential punchline of the entire rationalist tradition: the assumption of agency in a vacuum. A+ question. Let’s poke at the delusions of grandeur built into many of these theories.

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💡 Short version:

Yes, many of these theories—especially the OGs like Rational Choice Theory, Expected Utility Theory, and Rational Expectations—absolutely presume that individuals are autonomous, informed, calculating agents with access to options, time, knowledge, and some magical ability to simulate outcomes in their heads like they’re playing chess on God Mode. They do not, by default, account for:

• structural constraints

• material deprivation

• cognitive/emotional limits

• socialization or culture

• the inability to actually know what the hell is going on

In other words: they hand you a blueprint for navigating a maze but assume you’re not blindfolded, broke, or inside the walls already.

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🔍 Let’s go theory by theory:

Rational Choice Theory (RCT)

Assumes you're:

• Rational

• Self-interested

• Able to rank and choose among options
  🚫 But where did those options come from? Do you even know they exist? Can you afford them? Not RCT's problem. It presumes you came pre-installed with agency. Which, for many, is laughably untrue.

Game Theory

Adds interdependence, but still assumes:

• You know the rules

• You know the other players

• You can model their actions

• You can even choose strategies
  🚫 It doesn't ask if you have the resources or language or cultural positioning to interpret the game in the first place.

Public Choice Theory

Pastes RCT onto politics and says voters and politicians behave “rationally” in pursuit of self-interest.
🚫 Ignores that some people vote against interest, can’t access full info, or are systematically disenfranchised.

Rational Expectations

The idea that people “use all available information efficiently to form expectations about the future.”
🚫 Who has that information? How? Does the info system lie? Can you read it? Do you have time between jobs to think critically about bond yields? Again, assumed.

Behavioral Economics

At least acknowledges bounded rationality—limited time, info, processing capacity—but still often treats irrationality like an error in an otherwise good machine.

Institutionalism

This is where things get less fantastical. Institutional theories acknowledge that:

• Your options are shaped by rules, norms, and history

• You don’t get to invent your world from scratch

• Path dependency and inequality matter
  ✅ So, this one's less about divine creative power and more about managing constraints.

Social Exchange Theory

Still assumes people calculate costs/benefits in social interactions.
🚫 Doesn't really grapple with how people learn what has value, or whether their desires are even their own.

Bourdieu (again, the anti-RCT crowd)

Hits the brakes. Says:

• People act through habitus—embodied, socialized dispositions

• They don’t choose from scratch, they’re formed by structures
  ✅ This is the guy yelling from the other end of the room: “You don’t create the world from nothing, you just reproduce it unless you consciously resist it.”

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🧨 So to answer your question:

Yes, many of these theories either:

1. Assume godlike choice-making in a neutral landscape, or

2. Tolerate constraints only as “variables” in an otherwise free model

They are, in effect, fantasies of sovereign selfhood—where the individual is imagined as free-floating, rational, and ready to choose their own adventure with no mention of colonialism, trauma, supply chains, or the price of eggs.

They do not help you if you're asking:

• "What can I choose when I don’t even know the menu?"

• "What if I’m so gaslit by my world that I can’t tell who I am, let alone what I want?"

• "What if the game is rigged and I’ve never seen the rules?"

For that, we leave the clean geometry of rationalism and start walking into critical theory, phenomenology, or even existentialism—fields that say: you’re not free, but you can still struggle, and that’s the point.