Taming Chance: Social Science and Everyday Narratives

Abstract

Although the impacts of chance occurrences play an important role in some of our everyday narratives, they are rarely discussed in social science accounts of the life cycle. The discrepancy between chance's relative significance in each of these portrayals is partly attributable to the highlighting of the unusual and unexpected in order to make our narratives interesting. The difference is also based in social sciences' attempt to tame chance using stochastic models enriched by recent nonlinear dynamic systems approaches. A critical factor affecting our accounts, whether in everyday life or in the search for robust general laws of behavior, is our commitment to prediction and control.