Herbert A. Simon Quotes

My research career has been devoted to understanding human decision-making and problem-solving processes. The pursuit of this goal has led me into the fields of political science, economics, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of science, among others.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

Early in my doctoral training at Cornell University, I became immersed in the behavioral decision theory paradigm.

Objective leaders identify their unproductive mental models and tweak them for greater effectiveness.

My first undertaking in the way of scientific experiment was in the field of economics and psychology.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn't get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.

It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

The systematic experimental study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

Learning about the way people process information and their emotions is hugely helpful to my work.

Positive defaults align our short-term decisions with our long-term interests. And we don't always do that.

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can't even answer the simplest questions.

The sad truth is that many behavioral economists know very little about psychology.

I love Richard Thaler's 'Quasi Rational Economics.' A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.

A nudge is some feature of the environment that changes the behaviour of humans but would not change the behaviour of rational economic agents, what we call Econs.

The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory.

It is true that I am one of the co-authors of 'Nudge,' and I am a behavioral economist, but it does not mean that everything we write about in that book is behavioral economics, nor does it mean that my co-author, the distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein, is a behavioral economist.

Humans are hard-wired to be irrational when it comes to financial decisions. We must understand that so we don't become the sucker at the poker table.

One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.