"But I don’t think that this is what we see. In general it seems like individuals don’t display this pretty weird erratic behaviour and so I don’t think objections to these axioms are particularly strong reasons to reject rational choice modelling. "
In reality, people DO prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. It happens all the time. In fact, this was demonstrated all the way back in 1954: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1909827 and then Kahneman and Tversky made a whole career out of exploiting this type of thing.
There are further issues when trying to extrapolate individual choice to group choice, since transitivity isn't even almost allowed in group decisions. Marquis de Condorcet proved that in the 1700s.
As George Box famously said, all models are wrong, some are useful.
You have to ask yourself if a rational choice model is useful in a given situation. This will generally not be the case, but maybe there are edge cases in which it is.
I think my main counterargument to that is that we don't see cyclic behaviour very often. Maybe it's just than transaction costs are high enough, but if people have non-transitive preferences explained important facets of the social world I'd expect to see cyclic behaviour. For instance it seems like individuals don't have cyclic preferences over most normal goods and services, or jobs or politcal candidates.
I'm not aware of Kahneman and Tversky on cyclic preferences, I know they've shown that induviudals change their choices when presented with a superset which is close but not quite the same thing.
One of the threads of preference reversal is intransitivity, as noted in that article.
Rational choice is about as far from descriptive as you can get. It's a decent prescriptive model to aspire to, but eliciting preferences from people is like pulling teeth, only harder. Decision scientists are delving into "fuzzy set theory" and "grey systems theory" trying to tackle the issue.
As for your research on nuclear war, the problem is that individuals are not the ones going to nuclear war. Nations are, and they are multiparty entities. There are many factions within a nation that would support or oppose actions which could lead to war (or nuclear war), and even those factions are made up of individuals. And then, those individuals may have fuzzy preferences. It's a complex issue.
You're wrong about this point:
"But I don’t think that this is what we see. In general it seems like individuals don’t display this pretty weird erratic behaviour and so I don’t think objections to these axioms are particularly strong reasons to reject rational choice modelling. "
In reality, people DO prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. It happens all the time. In fact, this was demonstrated all the way back in 1954: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1909827 and then Kahneman and Tversky made a whole career out of exploiting this type of thing.
There are further issues when trying to extrapolate individual choice to group choice, since transitivity isn't even almost allowed in group decisions. Marquis de Condorcet proved that in the 1700s.
As George Box famously said, all models are wrong, some are useful.
You have to ask yourself if a rational choice model is useful in a given situation. This will generally not be the case, but maybe there are edge cases in which it is.
I think my main counterargument to that is that we don't see cyclic behaviour very often. Maybe it's just than transaction costs are high enough, but if people have non-transitive preferences explained important facets of the social world I'd expect to see cyclic behaviour. For instance it seems like individuals don't have cyclic preferences over most normal goods and services, or jobs or politcal candidates.
I'm not aware of Kahneman and Tversky on cyclic preferences, I know they've shown that induviudals change their choices when presented with a superset which is close but not quite the same thing.
Kahneman and Tversky tackle "Preference Reversal" here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2006743
One of the threads of preference reversal is intransitivity, as noted in that article.
Rational choice is about as far from descriptive as you can get. It's a decent prescriptive model to aspire to, but eliciting preferences from people is like pulling teeth, only harder. Decision scientists are delving into "fuzzy set theory" and "grey systems theory" trying to tackle the issue.
As for your research on nuclear war, the problem is that individuals are not the ones going to nuclear war. Nations are, and they are multiparty entities. There are many factions within a nation that would support or oppose actions which could lead to war (or nuclear war), and even those factions are made up of individuals. And then, those individuals may have fuzzy preferences. It's a complex issue.
There's a book about all of this by Howard Raiffa that delves deep into every aspect of these issues: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Negotiation_Analysis/e2n9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0