A Human Actor Model for Social Science

Abstract

This article presents a model of the production of human behaviour, grounded in a pragmatist perspective. The model has two components: a small set of considered behaviours, and a set of motivators which I group into four subsets: material, reproductive, and two sets of attributional motivators. The model is based on a minimum principle. A person performs that considered behaviour which comes closest to ideal in light of the person's motivators. I show that both declining marginal utility and satisfying follow as deductions from the model. In addition, especially with the inclusion of attributional motivators, the model accounts for a variety of findings in social science. I also show how it can generate theory and testable empirical predictions.

Formalism, Behavioral Realism and the Interdisciplinary Challenge in Sociological Theory

“…Whitmeyer (1998: 404), in a recent call for the usage and development of “Human Actor Models” in sociology appears to support White's diagnosis. He states that his perspective is not realist because…”

“…There can be other types that do not necessarily look like the classic expected utility model of the agent dominant in economics. The key characteristic of micro‐formalism is the rejection of “realisticness” (Maki 2002) as a desirable property of the actor model (Kanazawa 1998) in favor of the instrumentalist principle of predictive success or what Whitmeyer (1998) refers—unintendedly echoing Friedman's (1953) classic statement in the methodology of economics—to as the “pragmatist” criterion.…”

“…Take for instance Whitmeyer's (1998: 404) simultaneous claims that he is not concerned with realism, while at the same time being attentive to the compatibility between his Human Actor Model (HAM) and the micromechanisms of motivation and cognition being discovered in other fields (1998: 410), (not to mention his earlier [1994] rejection of the substrate‐independence principle in favor a stratified ontology). These positions are in conflicting tension and reveal Whitmeyer as much more committed to behavioral realism than he claims to be, especially because of his attention to issues related to the compatibility of his HAM with cognitive science, anthropology and symbolic interactionist sociology.…”

“…These positions are in conflicting tension and reveal Whitmeyer as much more committed to behavioral realism than he claims to be, especially because of his attention to issues related to the compatibility of his HAM with cognitive science, anthropology and symbolic interactionist sociology. For Whitmeyer (1998: 427–428), one the virtues of his proposed HAM is precisely that “ . .…”

A Choice Model of Occupational Status and Fertility

“…Whitmeyer, 1998), in least squares form. Specifically, people seek to minimize a weighted sum of squared deviations from their ideal levels of personal occupational status and fertility, which correspond to the two components of the model.…”