Thinker · TH-0206
Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon was an American social scientist who spent most of his career at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, working across economics, psychology, political…
Herbert Simon was an American social scientist who spent most of his career at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, working across economics, psychology, political science and computer science. He received the Turing Award in 1975, with Allen Newell, and the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. His idea of bounded rationality holds that real agents, lacking unlimited time, information and computation, do not optimise but satisfice, seeking options that are good enough, which reframes what rationality can reasonably demand.
Key ideas
- Rationality is bounded by limited information, time and computational capacity.
- Real agents satisfice, choosing options that meet an aspiration level, rather than optimising.
- Organisations and decision procedures can be understood as ways of coping with bounded rationality.
- Human problem solving can be modelled as heuristic search, an idea he pursued in early artificial intelligence.
Major works
- Administrative Behavior (1947)
- "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice" (1955)
- The Sciences of the Artificial (1969)
- Human Problem Solving (1972, with Allen Newell)
In the conversation
- Question Running a kitchen, I never pick the best option, just the first good one. Is that irrational?
On the map
The questions in The Coordinates of Thought where Herbert Simon takes a place.
- 2.6 Rationality Is it rational to believe what the evidence supports, or what serves you?