Customer Reviews

Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences

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For the past forty years, Jon Elster has attempted to explain things ranging from the emotions to technological change. The result is dozens of books (and even more papers) in three languages across four universities. And throughout, his work has not just been exemplary social science, but has always struggled with the question of what social science _should be_ -- what kinds of explanations are legitimate, which techniques should be used, and so on.

As he reaches his late sixties, it is understandable if he begins to think of his legacy. That certainly would help explain his latest book, _Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences_ (Cambridge University Press, 2007), a 500-page masterpiece that I expect will be seen as the summation of a brilliant career.

It's a book unlike any other and, as a result, unless read from start to finish can seem bizarre, if only because one has little sense of what the book is trying to do. It is not a guidebook, or a textbook, or a piece of social science in itself. In short, it is nothing less than an attempt to summarize an idealized vision of the whole of social science in simple language.

The book's foundational assumption (as implied by its title) is that the goal of social science is to discover explanations for social phenomena. It begins by describing what explanations are and discussing their different forms. But the bulk of the book consists of tools that can be used in explanations: emotions, norms, time discounting, weakness of will, magical thinking, cognitive dissonance, heuristics and biases, rationality, irrationality, neuroscience, evolution, externalities, game theory, pluralistic ignorance, informational cascades, collective action, cyclical preferences, institutions, etc. -- in short, the entire toolkit of the social sciences.

Just as amazing as the breadth topics is the way in which they're covered. Elster explains each phenomenon clearly and concisely, so that any educated reader can understand them with little effort, without ever sacrificing intellectual depth. His explanations are peppered with examples from an amazing variety of sources: ancient history, recent history, personal experience, the classics of social science (e.g. Tocqueville), the great philosophers (Montaigne, Pascal, Mill), and classic novelists (e.g. Proust). The result is a book which not just introduces readers to the discoveries of the social sciences but to the intellectual world as a whole. Bibliographical notes following each chapter as well as the conclusion provide a rich guide for further exploration.

And yet it's not simply a compendium of interesting results in the social sciences, but attempts to defend a particular conception of what the social sciences should be. In the conclusion, Elster defends his notion of social science as the attempt to discover particular explanations for particular phenomena against the "soft obscurantism" of the literary theorists and the "hard obscurantism" of the economists. As part of this, he turns his back on the notion of rational-choice models being an explanation in themselves, noting that their many assumptions are in desperate need of empirical defense.

In response to an earlier draft of this review, Elster wrote "I'm glad you appreciate the details in my book, but you're missing the big picture, which is that there isn't any." Instead of trying to build a Grand Theory which explains all of social life, we should try to build explanations of particular phenomena from the nuts and bolts we have lying around. And "even if a dominant explanation of a given event or episode is discarded and then resurrected, the building blocks or mechanisms at work in the discarding and resurrection remain. The repertory, or the size of the toolbox, does not shrink."

For anyone who cares about social science, Elster has done an amazing service in clearly describing the toolbox's contents and defending its importance.

I read this book twice. The first time, I thought that it was excellent, the best compendium of ideas of social science by arguably the best thinker in the field. I took copious notes, etc. I agreed with its patchwork-style approach to rational decision making. I knew that it had huge insights applicable to my refusal of general theories [they don't work], rather limit ourselves to nuts and bolts [they work].
Then I started reading it again, as the book tends to locate itself by my bedside and sneaks itself in my suitcase when I go on a trip. It is as if the book wanted me to read it. It is what literature does to you when it is at its best. So I realized why: it had another layer of depth --and the author distilled ideas from the works of Proust, La Rochefoucault, Tocqueville, Montaigne, people with the kind of insights that extend beyond the ideas, and that makes you feel that a reductionist academic treatment of the subject will necessary distort it [& somehow Elster managed to combine Montaigne and Kahneman-Tversky]. So as an anti-Platonist I finally found a rigorous treatment of human nature that is not Platonistic --not academic (in the bad sense of the word).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A very cogent summary of Elster's main themes: rationality and how one departs from it, especially from the static notion common in current rational choice theory. Anyone interested in rationality and departures from rationality--a topic much-ignored in current thinking and applications of rational choice theory-- should read this book. While I don't find that I agree with every conclusion Elster makes, he does make me think hard, which is about the best I ever expect.

With no footnotes, no jargon, no namedropping and (almost) no mathmatics, this book clears all the conceptual underbrush away from the foundations of the social and behavioral sciences. Reading it was like watching an intellectual kung fu master in a rapid-fire series of celebrity deathmatches. As soon as Elster has dispatched Milton Friedman (Whup-POW!), he moves on to Steven Jay Gould. He chops ideas up into neat 10-page sections, says what he has to say, then cracks his knuckles and moves on. He does this so effortlessly that I found myself scratching my head ("how did I not see this before?") at the end of each section. It's not exactly fun - the reading can be dense - but it can be thrilling to simply feel the dust and cobwebs shoot out of your ears. I learned more in 500 pages than in 6 years of undergraduate survey courses. Highly, highly recommended.

Jon Elster has a long history of being one of the most usefull people in the social sciences. This book, despite its dull name, is wonderful.

Anyone interested in rational choice should make this a first stop- Elster's attempt isn't worth missing.

As the title suggests, this book is an expanded and revised edition. As a non-professional and autodidact in the field of social sciences, I too find this book a gem as the other reviewers have so indicated. The book is divided into five (5) sections:

1) Explanations and Mechanisms
2) The Mind
3) Action
4) Lessons From The Natural Sciences
5) Interaction

Sections 2-5 are must reads if you are into the social sciences, but I found the first Section on Explanations and Mechanisms just a skosh on the highbrow side. However, we are talking about someone that has spent over 40 years on his work. Outside this very slight discomfort on my part, my copy is marked-up extensively which is a good indication that I found this fine addition to the social sciences worthy of my time and effort.

Though this book is somewhat on off the beaten track so to speak, other fine works on the social sciences that are worth your attention are Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (polymath classic), The Psychology of Judgment & Decision Making (classic), How We Know What Isn't So (very good), Mean Markets and Lizard Brains (Hidden Gem), Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger (Very Hidden Gem), or Poor Charlie's Almanack (Charlie's Insights).

If you are absolutely anyone; an undergraduate student, a postgraduate student, a researcher, a Social Science scientist, or anyone from any field of life; who is just interested in knowing a few intricacies of the studies in rationality and subversions of rationality, collective behaviour of people, human rational and irrational behaviour and so on, but in a *SIMPLE* manner, read this one... One of the absolute best books on rationality/irrationality, available in the world of Social Sciences. Other than this, "Sour Grapes" by Elster and a couple of other books by Sen, Arrow, Coleman and others, are a MUST read for a comprehensive understanding of the subject of rational choice, individual interests, collective action and public-choice theory...

A must read... go for it.

Subhasish Ghosh
University of Oxford
9th Feb 2006

This book is an indispensible introduction to the social sciences. It should be used alongside with Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing and Wayne Booth's et al The Craft of Research. This trio of books provide the corner stones for any social science student: what it is, how to write it and how to do it.

No one writes about social science more incisively and brilliantly than Jon Elster. This book retains his famous edge, with sharp, well-written, knowledgeable comments that can sum up or devastate a whole field in a few sentences. He is best on working epistemology and on economics and economic theory.
The other reviews, already posted, say enough about that. It is left to me to make a few comments on what is lacking here. Elster has updated his great summary NUTS AND BOLTS FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES (1989) with a vast amount of additional material, most of it relating to European novels and other literary writings (he is particularly fond of Montaigne and de Tocqueville). Unfortunately, the updating is sometimes a bit thin.
One major problem is that he still regards human personality traits as not fixed but largely and basically situational. This was widely accepted in the 1980s, following Walter Mischel's famous advocacy of the position in 1968, but it has not stood the test of time. Better personality theories (Costa and McCrae, etc.), research, and prospective studies have shown that basic personality traits remain constant through life. They may vary with situations, but do not really change much; an introvert may be more outgoing at a wild party than at a board meeting, but will in both contexts be notably more introverted than a solid extravert. Elster's counter-evidence comes from selective quotes from literary works--not even close to scientific arguing!
Another case is his dismissal of evolutionary psychology. It was brilliant, incisive, and devastating in the 1970s when he first made it. He has not significantly updated it. The evolutionary psychologists, however, read him (and others) and learned. The recent work on evolutionary social science, e.g. by Alexandra Maryanski and Jon Turner (and even by more traditional workers in the field like David Buss), is worlds away from the simplistic, naive just-so stories of the 1970s. To be sure, there are still some naive storytellers around, but they are not the leaders now. Elster's own answers to his questions on social action--see pp. 449-454--are more like the old just-so stories than are the works of modern evolutionary social scientists.
Notable also in this book is the total dismissal of anthropology, of which he says only that "social anthropology...has been moving in the direction of soft social science" (p. 461), which to him is ipso facto unscientific and therefore outside his consideration. This means that Elster simply does not consider culture at all. He thus ignores a large amount of thoroughly scientific anthropology, such as the recent work of Scott Atran, Brent Berlin, Roy D'Andrade, Michael Fischer, David Kronenfeld...the list goes on and on. And even soft anthropology can produce testable hypotheses; Clifford Geertz' ideas about Bali have often been tested, and some are right, some not so right. The point is that they are considerably more testable in the real world than many of Elster's claims--especially if nothing more than literary sources is adduced as evidence for the latter. Literature is fine for providing examples of scientifically proven matters; it is not so fine as stand-alone evidence.) Elster has himself moved in a much softer direction; his individualist, rational-choice view of the 1970s has moved to a wider vision including emotion, social interaction, literature, philosophy, and other such issues; but he has not made corresponding moves into the scientific research on some of these areas, leaving him in an odd position of denouncing soft social science while in fact practicing it.
I could go on, but will stop here and summarize: This book is wonderful for basic individual-choice, economics-based social theory. It is not so fine for interaction and institutions, but still good, and full of insights. It is still less fine for cultural and wider social (and evolutionary) issues. For those, readers might look at Jonathan Turner's recent 3-volume survey of sociological theory, or David Kronenfeld et al.'s BLACKWELL COMPANION TO COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY, among other books.

The book will certainly introduce you with many interesting ideas and theories on human nature and society. However, it won't give you much, if you are already familiar with classical writers and philosophers like Stendhal, Balzac, Nietzsche, Pascal, Dostoevsky and others.

It is not that he 'peppered' his explanations with their examples as the other reader noted; I rather had a feeling that Elster simply reviewed their writings with only few original thoughts added.

I would rather recommend buying original works as you would gain much more from them than from this abridged review of everything.