Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [139]
27. See Rampell (2010) for the story about politicians.
28. This argument has been made most forcefully by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, who argue that when “everything from conscious calculation to ‘cultural inertia’ may be squared with some variant of rational choice theory … our disagreement becomes merely semantic, and rational choice theory is nothing but an ever-expanding tent in which to house every plausible proposition advanced by anthropology, sociology, or social psychology.” (Green and Shapiro, 2005, p. 76).
CHAPTER 3: THE WISDOM (AND MADNESS) OF CROWDS
1. See Riding (2005) for the statistic about visitors. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa for other entertaining details about the Mona Lisa.
2. See Clark (1973, p. 150).
3. See Sassoon (2001).
4. See Tucker (1999) for the full article on Harry Potter. See (Nielsen 2009) for details of their Facebook analysis. See Barnes (2009) for the story on movies.
5. For the story about changes in consumer behavior postrecession, see Goodman (2009). Bruce Mayhew (1980) and Frank Dobbin (1994) have both made a similar argument about circular reasoning.
6. This argument was made long ago by the physicist Philip Anderson in a famous paper titled “More Is Different” (Anderson 1972).
7. For Thatcher’s original quote, see Keay (1987).
8. The definition of “methodological individualism” is typically traced to the early twentieth century in the writings of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1909, p. 231); however, the idea goes back much earlier, at least to the writings of Hobbes, and was popular among the thinkers of the Enlightenment, for whom an individualistic view of action fit perfectly with their emerging theories of rational action. See Lukes (1968) and Hodgson (2007) for a discussion of the intellectual origins of methodological individualism, as well as a scathing critique of its logical foundations.
9. I am oversimplifying here, but not a lot. Although the original models of business cycles did assume a single representative agent, more recent models allow for multiple agents, each of which represents different sectors of the economy (Plosser 1989). Nevertheless, the same essential problem arises in all these models: the agents are not actually real people, or even firms, who pay attention to what other people and firms are doing, but rather are representative agents who make decisions on behalf of a whole population.
10. A number of excellent critiques of the representative individual idea have been written, most notably by the economist Alan Kirman (1992). That the criticism is so well known, however, and yet has had so little influence on the actual practice of social science, should demonstrate how difficult a problem it is to expunge.
11. Even rational choice theorists—who are as much as anyone the inheritors of methodological individualism—are in practice just as comfortable applying the principle of utility maximization to social actors like households, firms, unions, “elites,” and government bureaus as to individual people. See Becker (1976), Coleman and Fararo (1992), Kiser and Hechter (1998), and Cox (1999) for numerous examples of representative agents employed in rational choice models.
12. See Granovetter (1978) for details of the “riot model.”
13. For more details on the origins of social influence, see Cialdini (2001) and Cialdini and Goldstein (2004)
14. For examples of cumulative advantage models, see Ijiri and Simon (1975), Adler (1985), Arthur (1989), De Vany and Walls (1996), and De Vany (2004).
15. For the “army in a lab” quote, see Zelditch (1969). Experiments, it should be noted, are not entirely foreign to sociology. For example, the field of “network exchange” is one area of sociology in which it is common