A couple times a year I pick up a sociology-adjacent book and it has the obligatory page or two explaining that the population in question seems to be crazy but is actually rationally following incentives. I have little patience for this, but figured, since these books are for laypeople, that the authors are being extra careful to get their casual reader on the same page

but modern econ/sociology papers do this also? I read them less frequently, but I follow a citation from time to time, and – it's bizarre. Your audience is mostly other econ/sociologists. Why spend a page reciting the same premises everyone else is stating? What value is there in this?

(Or am I falsely projecting a pattern that isn't there, because I'm so annoyed every time I come across this boilerplate? That's possible)

it really bothers me how little these authors seem to care about actually communicating their findings and opinions and reasoning. It feels like 25% of words 90% of papers exist to "do the social ritual of writing a paper". This viscerally offends me as a member of the human species