The following is in response to both the above comment and to your one on heuristics.

You’re missing the forest for the trees. Of course, this or that is consistent with “rational choice theory,” as you say, because that “theory” is an unfalsifiable triviality. The “theory” amounts to the affirmation that desires exist. By definition, desires motivate action, so by your simplified presentation of the “theory,” “if you hold that humans choose things to support their goals, whatever those are, you are a rational choice theorist,” the “theory” says only that desires (motivations that cause actions/choices) exist. Also, as Daniel Dennett pointed out, there’s no falsifying the claim that desires exist. This is part of the intentional stance which we’ve infamously taken towards everything in nature, as in animism.

Obviously, saying only that desires exist isn’t a theory of any kind. Thus, my two questions are (1) why this triviality is called a theory, and (2) why it’s associated with rationality. My foregoing hypothesis answers those two mysteries. The triviality is called a theory out of sheer scientism, and it’s associated with rationality due to a libertarian equivocation that lends support to capitalism.

The “theory” insinuates that the results of these “rational” choices (i.e. mere effects of desire, which applies then just as fully to all animal species) are rational in the honourific sense, as though the economic sense of “rationality” weren’t merely a misnomer but had something to do with the ordinary sense of rationality, according to which being rational is good, as in it’s better than being irrational. All capitalism is supposed to call for is the unleashing of personal desires, in which case the results of that competition, namely neo-feudalistic economic inequalities are implicitly justified as the results of “rational choices.”

If there were no such connection between the two senses of “rational,” why not call the bogus economic theory the Lumberjack Choice Theory? The “theory” has as much to do with rationality (i.e. with agreeableness to reason, the exercising of sound judgment and good sense) as it does with lumberjacks.