Herbert Alexander Simon Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Herbert Alexander Simon (1916–2001) was an American psychologist and economist. His research focused on decision making and its implications for social institutions.

Simon, the son of German-Jewish immigrants, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended public school and entered the University of Chicago in 1933 on a full scholarship, earning a BA in 1936 in political science (he majored in political science because he did not wish to take accounting, which was required of economics majors at the university). After graduating from Chicago, he went to work as a researcher for the International City Managers Association (1936–1939) and then moved to the Bureau of the Public Administration at the University of California-Berkeley (1939–1942). In 1942 he joined the political science department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, teaching there until 1949 and serving as department chair from 1946 to 1949. In 1943 he won his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago. At Chicago, he studied under Harold Lasswell and Charles Edward Merriam.

In 1949 Simon joined the faculty of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (since 1967 the Carnegie Mellon University) and would remain there for the rest of his academic career. At Carnegie, he was Professor of Administration (1949–1967) and the Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology (1967–2001).

Simon made contributions to a number of fields. He was an early proponent of computer artificial intelligence, creating with computer scientist Allen Newell what they called a “thinking machine” in 1955. In economics, Simon argued that the theory of economic man, which contends that individuals make rational economic decisions that maximize personal benefits, failed to account for the uncertainty of human action. His research on decision making by business executives, published in Administrative Behavior (1947), led him to conclude that business leaders failed to maximize profits because they made decisions without assessing all information and long-term effects. He argued that the complexities of the modern world meant that individuals could not process or even obtain all the information they needed to make decisions. Instead, they try to make decisions that are merely good enough. He called this approach bounded rationality. Instead of economic man, Simon suggested that administrative man attempts to find courses of action that are satisfactory. His work also had an influence on the study of decision making in the public sector. In psychology, he was a leader of the cognitive revolution in the 1960s as scientists began using computer models to study human thought processes.

In 1978 Simon won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In the citation, the Swedish Academy of Sciences proclaimed that “modern business economics and administrative research are largely based on Simon’s ideas.” He also won the A.M. Turing Award for his work in computer science (1975), the National Medal of Science (1986), and the American Psychological Association’s award for outstanding lifetime contributions to the field (1993).

Bibliography:

Crowther-Heyck, Hunter. Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Earl, Peter E., ed. The Legacy of Herbert Simon in Economic Analysis. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2001.
Klahr, David, and Kenneth Kotovsky. Complex Information Processing: The Impact of Herbet A. Simon. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1989.
Simon, Herbert A. Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization. New York: Macmillan, 1947.
Models of Man: Social and Rational; Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting. New York: Wiley, 1957.
The New Science of Management Decision. New York: Harper, 1960.
Simon, Herbert A., Donald W. Smithburg, and Victor A.Thompson. Public Administration. New York: Knopf, 1950.

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