should the scholar conclude that the end result of his decision serves to sat-
isfy the actual “reward” he desires? One might equally suggest that his shy-
ness or insecurity is “irrational” and that it deprives him of the “reward” of
a possible relationship. The reduction of human decision-making to the basic
currency of this concept of “compensation” is based upon assumptions whose
logic is tenuous at best.
It is also noteworthy that Stark’s conceptualization of human desire is nar-
row and highly materialistic. His approach reveals how the behavior mod-
els developed by game theory contain subtle assumptions about human
nature. The concept of compensation, for example, focuses on immediate
material benefits (wealth, power, health, immortality), but displays little atten-
tion on other important, though less empirically measurable values, such as
relationships, identity, meaning, etc.
This limitation is related to another weakness of the rational choice model
as it is applied to the study of religion. Numerous scholars of religion prob-
lematize the tendency to define and conceive of “religion” strictly in terms
of a belief system. Talal Asad, for example, insists upon a greater apprecia-
tion for the roles of ritual and performance in the formation of “religious”
identities and communities. He argues that “embodied practice” forms the
“precondition for varieties of religious experience” (1993:62–78). This broad-
ening of the concept of “religion” reveals the extent to which Stark’s reduc-
tion of it to a belief in heavenly rewards is simplistic and culturally limited.
It also challenges the narrow scope of his conception of human desires and
rewards. This neglect of the diversity found among religious communities
and human desires suggests that the approach of rational choice theory is
built upon ideological assumptions about society and human beings.^7 It does
not attend in any significant way to examining its own methodological pre-
suppositions, but often describes basic human motivations as if they are self-
evident and “natural.”
It is at the level of its core presuppositions that the rational choice model
of religion is most problematic and bears the closest resemblance to the reduc-
tive treatment of relationships in A Beautiful Mind. As N. J. Demerath argues
against rational choice theory, “the models may be elegant even if the world
is not” (1995:105). Kenneth J. Arrow observes the role that presuppositions
From A Beautiful Mindto the Beautiful Soul • 163(^7) Donald P. Greenbury and Ian Shapiro observe a similar problem in the applica-
tion of rational choice theory to the study of voter behavior in political science (1994).