two formulas that are relevant here.
The first one, obviously is weighing the cost benefit,
like putting in so much and not getting enough.
But very often when people get into relationship,
they will also taking another angle to look at the so-called exchange.
It's like how much have you put in and how much have I put in?
Maybe I have put in not a lot and getting a lot out of that.
But if I am sitting there looking at you and
find that you are not putting in as much,
the person may still feel dissatisfied because they're saying, oh that's not fair.
So there are actually two sets of calculations that are supposedly going on.
But as you have already pointed out,
that has to assume that human beings are really rational.
And I think we have all the reasons to believe that human beings
actually aren't that rational.
Interestingly, in year 2000, a Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to
a psychologist or someone who did the experimental social psychology research.
Daniel Kahneman put forward the Prospect Theory and
that won him the Nobel Prize back in 2002.
So what he actually is trying to point out, it's that like
human beings actually rarely behave totally rationally.
And he has decades of experimental findings to back up this claim.
So this is also the same assumption made by a communist for a long time.
That people they do things to maximize utility so
they do those cost benefit analysis and make sure that
I'm gaining the maximum possible out of any deal.
But I think we now have a fair bit of evidence
to show that like people do not really do that.
So instead of looking at exchange,
we may want to be understanding why people continue doing what they're doing.
And then when we are in social services, for example,
we find a lot of people sticking around in abusive relationships.
Relationships that actually undermines their sense of self-worth.
Relationships that are outright damaging, destructive,
and people seem to stick around for a long time, right?
So we really need to understand relationships beyond just
looking at this like simple, rational exchange formula.
And we have to be careful when we say that as well,
because we do not want to give people this simple black, white, either, or.
I'm not saying that the social exchange dimension is totally irrelevant.
I'm saying that it may explain a certain percentage of variance.
Some aspects of the relationship might be explainable with like social
exchange formulation but relationships are obviously more complicated than that.
