Matthew Reed wrote a post about Lisa Servon’s book “The Unbanking of America”. This comment stood out for me (emphasis mine):
By treating her various sources as intelligent people responding rationally to their circumstances, rather than as helpless victims of evil predators, [Servon] was able to stitch together a pretty good argument for why people make the choices they make.In its approach, it reminded me a little of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Lower Ed” or Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted.” In their different ways, each book addresses a policy question that is usually framed in terms of smart, crafty, evil people taking advantage of clueless, ignorant, poor people, and blows up the assumption. In no case are predators let off the hook, but the “prey” are actually (mostly) capable and intelligent people doing the best they can. Understanding why this is the best they can do, and what would give them better options, leads to a very different set of prescriptions.
Sidney Dekker calls this perspective the local rationality principle. It assumes that people make decisions that are reasonable given the constraints that they are working within, even though from the outside those decisions appear misguided.
I find this assumption of rationality to be a useful frame for explaining individual behavior. It’s worth putting in the effort to identify why a particular decision would have seemed rational within the context in which it was made.
Surfing Complexity 