Accounting for Purposive Social Action

This paper articulates a sociological approach to analyzing individual choices. I discuss sociological roadblocks to economic thinking, namely disagreements about preference formation, social influence, and the importance of group-level phenomena. I show that these ideas can be integrated into an individual choice modeling approach based on the assumption that individuals maximize the "morality" or "rightness" of a choice in a particular context, rather than its rational utility. I suggest that scholars place explicit constraints on the analysis itself, rather than on the cognition of the actors being analyzed, which allows for truly scientific, endogenous models of individual choice that maintain analytical rigor. I conclude by elaborating several tools for methodological implementation of the model.