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I recently presented a lecture "Is Behavioral Economics Doomed" at the European University Institute in Florence. It was part of a series of lectures in honor of Max Weber. Since a key issue in behavioral economics is the role of psychological phenomenon such as emotion in decision making, I was curious as to what Max Weber thought of this - Weber being a pioneer of what is now called rational choice theory. Kenneth Allan provides a nice summary of Max Weber's thinking on the topic.
Value-rational behavior is distinguished from affective action because Weber sees some semblance of self-aware decision-making processes in value-rationality. Values are emotional, but when we consciously decided to act because of the logic of our values, it is rational behavior. Emotion, on the other hand,is irrational and proceeds simply from the feelings that an actor may have in a given situation. [Chapter 5: Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory, Chapter 5, Pine Forges Press, 2005]
This is similar to the distinction, for example, that Drew Fudenberg and I draw in our work on the dual self model . Indeed Max Weber's own words about the essential irrationality of that deepest of all emotions - love - is instructive
Under these conditions, the erotic relation seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other. The boundless giving of oneself is as radical as possible in its opposition to all functionality, rationality, and generality. . . It is so overpowering that it is treated "symbolically": as a sacrament. The lover realizes himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavor. He knows himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine. [Max Weber, Zwischenbetrachtung, 1958] |