Rational Lives is a study of value formation and change, group identification, and conflict over social norms and lifestyles. Most scholars who study value conflicts have resisted rational choice approaches to the subject on the grounds that social conflict between groups is best explained by expressive motives and other nonrational factors. In contrast to this view, Dennis Chong shows that a single model that combines economic and sociological mechanisms can explain how people make decisions across both cultural and economic realms. He argues that the investments people make in the norms and values of their communities reflect the influence of their psychological dispositions, as well as the social and material costs and benefits of the options they face.

Chong brings these issues to life by examining a variety of historical and contemporary political conflicts over social norms. In one example, he explores what happens when residents of a Texas community must decide if they are willing to compromise their moral values in exchange for a new business development that will create jobs and fuel the local economy. He also shows how a new norm of racial equality diffused in the South following World War II as people modified their attitudes and behavior when it became too costly for them to continue their past practices. Through these and other cases, Chong demonstrates that our understanding of social conflict must recognize that norms have instrumental power and that people have an emotional attachment to their culture.

Rational Lives yields numerous insights into how people are mobilized around common identities and values to defend their way of life. Most significantly, the book offers a provocative explanation of how ingrained norms and values can change over time in spite of the myriad forces working to maintain the status quo.

"Rational Lives is an outstanding contribution to the rational choice debate, one that both its critics and especially its more gung-ho defenders should read carefully." -- Michael Taylor, University of Washington

"Dennis Chong's new book is full of hard thinking and interesting case studies. It will interest all social scientists concerned with the debate between rational choice theory and cultural explanations. Going beyond the tired polemics on both sides, he constructs a new interpretation of human behavior in which culture and individual rationality both matter. In Chong's argument, people take symbols and other cultural signs seriously even when there is no instrumentally rational reason to do so. Yet culture is not static: it responds over time in a quasi-Bayesian manner. Many of the disputes between rational choice and their opponents are thus resolved, leaving neither side a complete victor. The synthesis is a more comprehensive and powerful explanatory framework than either side could have produced, and Chong's creativity should influence subsequent interpretations of our social life in fundamental ways." -- Christopher H. Achen, University of Michigan