An article just published in Glamour (a friend tweeted it, okay?) applies the term “baby roulette” to the way a persistently high number of women use birth control inconsistently. Unable to decide when or whether to have a baby, many women—especially women who feel secure in their relationships—decide to let fate take the wheel. “I expected a lot of women would say, ‘I don’t want to get pregnant,’” one researcher says. “And I expected that others would say, ‘I do want to have a baby.’ I didn’t expect that the same people would say both. There’s this push-pull going on.”

The article piqued my interest as an illustration of the limitations of what social scientists call “rational choice theory.” The theory—which economists are particularly inclined to favor—posits that people have reasons for their choices. If you want to understand why a group of people are making a certain set of choices, look at their incentives. As their cost/benefit analysis changes, so should their actions.

Think about pregnancy, for example. My friend, the sociologist Dave Harding, studied at-risk teens’ choices regarding pregnancy (among other matters). A rational choice explanation of teen pregnancy would predict that pregnancy should be highest among people who have the greatest incentive to get pregnant. If pregnancy is relatively high among teens in poor inner-city neighborhoods, that explanation would have it, that’s because those teens see fewer benefits to remaining childless than teens in more affluent neighborhoods, and possibly expect that having children will result in benefits such as prestige, affection, and maybe even material resources such as food and money. Even if that’s not an accurate analysis of the costs and benefits of pregnancy, a rational choice theory would have it, the teens might be convinced that it is by people around them—like people who are convinced that buying lottery tickets is a good money-making strategy.

Dave found, though, that the reality is more complicated. He found that the teens he studied were actually getting a wide variety of messages. Teachers, health professionals, parents, and some of their peers were telling them to not get pregnant and to stay in school; other peers and people of influence in their lives were suggesting that having a baby would be a good thing. One day a teenage girl might notice a peer who earned academic honors and a scholarship; another day she might notice a peer who had a baby and was successfully raising it along with the baby’s caring father. Both situations might seem tempting in different ways, and in the heat of a moment when it came time to decide whether or not to use a condom…well, she might just decide to spin the wheel.

The reality that people’s decision-making—even regarding matters as serious as whether or not to have a child—is often messy and confused is important not just for social scientists to realize, but for anyone who wants to understand human behavior and morality. In the off-and-running presidential campaign, a lot of candidates want to see the world in stark black and white, to say this is good and this is bad and this is the right choice, period. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have values and ideals and goals, but there’s a difference between confidence and blind certainty. The reality is that the world is complex, and our decisions are highly contingent on circumstance and emotion. Even if the candidates can’t admit they understand that truth about human nature, you can bet their campaign managers do.

– Jay Gabler

Photo by Beatrice Murch (Creative Commons)