Research Catalog

Title

Choosing an identity : a general model of preference and belief formation / Sun-Ki Chai.

Author

Chai, Sun-Ki.

Publication

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, ©2001.

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Details

Description

viii, 344 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• "Social science research is fragmented by the widely differing and seemingly contradictory approaches used by the different disciplines of the social sciences to explain human action. Attempts at integrating different social science approaches to explain action have often been frustrated by the difficulty of incorporating cultural assumptions into rational choice theories without robbing them of their generality or making them too vague for predictions. Another problem has been the major disagreements among cultural theorists regarding the ways in which culture affects preferences and beliefs."
• "Sun-Ki Chai provides a general model of preference and belief formation, addressing the largest unresolved issue in rational choice theories of action. With Choosing an Identity, Chai plays a bridging role between these approaches by augmenting and modifying the main ideas of the rational choice model to make it more compatible with empirical findings in other fields. The resulting model is used to analyze three major unresolved issues in the developing world: the sources of a government's economic ideology, the origins of ethnic group boundaries, and the relationship between modernization and violence."--Jacket.

Subject

• Rational choice theory
• Group identity
• Identity (Psychology)
• Social Identification
• group identity
• Group identity
• Rational choice theory
• Rational Choice
• Gruppenidentität

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-320) and index.

Contents

The Success and Failure of Rational Choice -- The Assumptions of the Rational Choice Approach -- The Strengths of Conventional Rational Choice -- The Weaknesses of Conventional Rational Choice -- The Chapter Structure of This Book -- Alternatives to Conventional Rational Choice: A Survey -- Structural Assumptions and Models -- Assumptions about Decision Making -- Preference and Belief Assumptions -- A General Model of Preference and Belief Formation -- An Identity Coherence Model of Preference and Belief Formation -- Assumptions of the Model -- Basic Implications of the Model -- Preference and Belief Change -- Rewards and Preference and Belief Change -- Implications for Dynamic Choice -- Implications for Collective Choice -- Plan for the Following Chapters -- Proofs of Theorems -- Ideology Formation and Policy Choice in Ex-Colonies -- Theories of Policy Formation -- The Conventional Model of the State -- Variations on the Conventional Model of the State -- An Identity Formation Theory of Oppositional Ideology Formation and Policy -- A Statistical Analysis of Economic Intervention -- The Origins of Ethnic Identity and Collective Action -- Rationalist Theories of Ethnic Collective Action -- A Coherence-Rational Choice Theory of Ethnic Group Formation -- Structural Change, Cultural Change, and Civic Violence -- Theories of Tradition and Modernity -- An Coherence Rational Choice Theory of Structural Change, Altruism, and Collective Action -- Modifying the Assumptions of the Model -- Justifications for the Coherence Model.

ISBN

• 0472107011
• 9780472107018

LCCN

00060741

OCLC

• ocm44681864
• 44681864
• SCSB-8798734

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library