Another.

And there we go.

Yeah, thank you very much for this kind introduction, Professor Miller, thank you very much for the invitation I'm very happy to be here.

Indeed, as you said and as we discussed before it's it's kind of a challenge to talk to this diverse audience. So therefore I might add that, you know, if you don't understand anything or you want to clarify me certain things please jump in while I'm talking.

I might not see the hand so someone else might moderate this but I'm very happy to answer all your questions, because I have no idea what kind of backgrounds you have.

When I talk when I looked at the pre the program at the previous talks I've had a little bit of an outlier because at least people had something to do with, you know, actual science, doing science doing anthropology related to Asia.

So I'm, I'm none of this I'm a philosopher of the social sciences.

And just for those of you who might not know what that is a philosophers of the social sciences and history, and I'm also doing history of science and historians of science, they think about science and what science is what science should be what scientists are doing

what they should be doing.

And I'm focusing in particular on economics as a science so I'm asking myself questions in my research about, you know, what kind of science is economics. How does an economic theory look like what should an economic model look like what should an economic

model do.

What is a good economic explanations. Those are the kinds of questions that I'm asking myself so it's, it's reflecting on the actual research process of science scientists.

So probably, I'm reflecting on what you guys are doing in your research, later on, and what you are in your masters currently studying in order so methods you know series, those kinds of things that you're later on probably use in order to do research about

you know finding out about the world. So I'm reflecting on those things and so this is a is a rather apps, sometimes a rather abstract endeavor.

And that's why I'm further encouraging you to ask questions.

And what I'm going to talk about today and now I'm going to share my screen.

Oh, host disabled participants screen sharing.

So I get I'm terribly sorry give me a second it should. Sorry, my mistake.

No worries.

I share my desktop.

My screen, my slides. So do you see my slides now.

Yes. Okay, great. So what I'm going to talk about today is a project of mine that I'm hopefully finishing soon, which originally originated in.

So I studied economics and this research originated in a puzzle meant that I had about economics when I actually did and that might relate a little bit to what you guys doing.

So, working right after getting my degree in economics in Ecuador and Ecuadorian rainforest and there I tried to understand how people could actually collaborate with each other in order to reach the goal of sustainable natural

resource management. And there I realized I had studied theories in economics and models in economics that would not help me at all to understand how these people were behaving there.

So they were culturally very different.

You know they they behaved in ways that I didn't, I didn't at all understand and when I asked them about you know their motivations for what they wanted to do with you know this, this bit of rainforest that they were living in that all kinds of motivations

about what they could be doing with it, they were, you know, sometimes very self interested but sometimes also altruistically interested or motivated there were sometimes very concerned about the value of the forest but sometimes they didn't care at all about

the value of the forest. So in other words that they had all kinds of motives. And what I've learned in economics was something very different and that's, that's because you learn in economics one specific theory

that allows you to talk about and think about human agency and that's the theory of rational choice.

And you don't learn this theory only in economics you learn this theory also, also in other social and behavioral sciences I'm sure the anthropologists among you have heard about this in economic anthropology but also sociologists extensively

study and use rational choice theory in order to theorize about human behavior so it's a, it's the theory of human behavior in in the social sciences.

And what it does in a nutshell is it a lot, it conceptualizes human behavior as a form of rational behavior whereby what rationality means here is something that is highly debated and it's also not settled.

There is a variety of interpretations that rationality or the concept of rationality has gained. And when, when you dig deeper into the literature and look at how social scientists are actually thinking about and using rational choice

theory and particularly in economics, you see that this theory of rational choice, which is oftentimes thought about as a unified, you know theory of human behavior. It's actually quite diverse.

And I'm going to talk about today about this diversity of rational choice theory.

And the implicate if you acknowledge that this rational choice theory is actually diverse, and that there are many variants of rational choice theory. This puzzle man that I had when I did fieldwork research would actually, you know, to a certain degree,

be,

you know,

solved in the sense that there are some purposes for which rational choice theory is useful and there are other purposes for which it is not useful and it was certainly not useful to think about human agency in the Ecuadorian rainforest, but it is certainly useful

for other kinds of purposes.

So that's what I'm going to talk about today.

And what is rational choice theory I already mentioned a little bit of what the actual idea is but let me get this more make this more concrete rational choice theory is an approach that has its origins in economics.

And it has been called an economic approach to human behavior in the sense that economists since you know the 18th century have thought about human agency in terms of rationality. And the idea is, in a nutshell, again, that

you know we can model human behavior and decision making and choices in terms of rational behavior. And the idea of rationality, I said before that there's there are many interpretation of what rationality actually means when you look into the details of how

rational choice theories are specified in the social sciences. However, in a nutshell when you look in into a back into economics. The idea of rationality is more or less the idea that agents act rationally when they weigh their options that they have on the table

so they have various options that they can choose from. And they weigh these options, according to what they desire, what they think you know what they want, and what they believe the world will look like in the future.

And on that basis, they order these options, according to what which option best satisfies their desires. And then they choose the one, the one option that best satisfies their desires.

And in economics because it's oftentimes, you know, used to think about economic decision making, meaning decision making within the market context where you exchange goods, goods and you pay money for this.

It's oftentimes a thought that people, you know, are narrowed down to desires that are actually material. So it's about monetary, you know, the, the option or the ideas that you choose the option that gives you the best monetary payoff.