Abstract
[We] need models of rational choice that provide a less God-like and more rat-like picture of the chooser.1
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Notes
Herbert A. Simon, “Letter to Ward Edwards,” in Herbert Simon Tapers, Carnegie-Mellon University Archives, box 5, folder 203, August 16, 1954.
Ward Edwards, “The theory of decision making,” Tsychological Bulletin 51.4 (1954): 380–417.
John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944).
On the idea of the “finite problem-solver” as the new model human, see: Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005);
Hunter Crowther-Heyck, “Mind and network,” Annals of the History of Computing 27.3 (2005): 103–104.
Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine, eds., The Unsocial Social Science: Economics and Neighboring Disciplines Since 1945, Annual Supplement to HOPE (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior, Second (@1957) ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 102.
For an insightful overview of “embedded liberalism” versus “neoliberalism” that discusses choice, reason, and individual freedom, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Kenneth Arrow surveys several of these redefinitions and their potential uses in Kenneth J. Arrow, “Utilities, attitudes, choices: A review note,” Econometrica 26.10 (1958): 1–23.
This argument is the center of H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (NY: Vintage, 1958).
Also see Dorothy Ross, Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), especially her Introduction;
Edward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1973).
Hughes, Consciousness and Society. Some exemplary works include Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961);
Vilfredo Pareto, Mind and Society, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935).
Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, ed., The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967);
William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: A Monograph of an Immigrant Group, (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1918–1920);
William Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1923).
For Merriam and Lasswell’s interest in psychology, see Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics, 106–107, 171. Also see Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics, (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1930);
Merriam, Non-Voting, Causes and Methods of Control, (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1924).
Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, esp. chapters 2–3, 10. For an insightful analysis of concerns about the rationality of the public in the age of mass communications, see Richard Butsch, The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publies, and Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Examples of such systems thinking include: David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York: Knopf, 1953);
Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951); Simon, Administrative Behavior.
James Grier Miller, “Toward a general theory for the behavioral sciences,” American Psychologist 10.9 (1955): 513–531.
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963).
Warren Weaver and Claude E. Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
On this view of language, see Hunter Crowther-Heyck, “George A. Miller, language, and the computer metaphor of mind,” History of Psychology 2.1 (1999): 37–64.
James G. March, Herbert A. Simon, and Harold Guetzkow, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958); Simon, Administrative Behavior;
Herbert A. Simon, Donald Smithburg, and Victor Thompson, Public Administration, First ed. (New York: Knopf, 1950).
Peter F. Drucker, Concept of the Corporation (New York: The John Day Company, 1946).
Robert A. Dahl, and Charles Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953);
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice; How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, Second ed. (New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1948);
Bernard Berelson, Voting; a Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954);
Sarah Elizabeth Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Herbert A. Simon, “Notes on the observation and measurement of political power,” Journal of Politics 15 (November 1953); Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950).
Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951); Paul A. Samuelson, “Consumption theory in terms of revealed preference,” Economica (1948): 243–253; Paul A. Samuelson, “Social indifference curves,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (1956): 1–22.
Herbert A. Simon, “A comparison of game theory and learning theory,” Psychometrika 21 (September 1956); Herbert A Simon, “Theories of decisionmaking in economics and behavioral science,” American Economic Review 49.3 (1959): 253–283.
James March, “An introduction to the theory and measurement of influence,” The American Political Science Review, 49.2 (June 1955): 431–451.
R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (New York: Wiley, 1957).
Abraham Wald, Statistical Decision Functions (New York: Wiley, 1950).
Irving Louis Horowitz, ed. The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967);
Mark Solovey, “Project Camelot and the 1960s epistemo-logical revolution: Rethinking the politics-patronage-social science nexus,” Social Studies of Science 31.2 (2001): 171–206.
The paraphrase above is drawn from several dozen articles published in leading economic journals between 1948 and 1958. Three of the best exemplars are Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951); Marschak, “Rational behavior, uncertain prospects, and measurable utility”; Paul A. Samuelson, “A note on the pure theory of consumer’s behaviour,” Economica (1938): 61–71.
Note the new line of research in the economics of information and communication exemplified by the work of Ronald Coase and Martin Shubik. See Martin Shubik, “Information, risk, ignorance, and indeterminacy,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 68.4 (November 1954): 629–640;
Ronald Coase, “The new institutional economics,” The American Economic Review, 88.2 (1998): 72–74;
Anoop Madhok, “Reassessing the fundamentals and beyond: Ronald Coase, the transaction cost and resource-based theories of the firm and the institutional structure of production,” Strategic Management Journal, 23.6 (2002): 535–550;
Richard A. Posner, “Nobel Laureate: Ronald Coase and methodology,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 7.4 (1993): 195–210;
Martin Shubik, “Information, rationality, and free choice in a future democratic society,” Daedalus, 96.3 (Summer 1967): 771–778;
Martin Shubik, “Information, theories of competition, and the theory of games,” The Journal of Political Economy, 60.2 (April 1952): 145–150.
Herbert A. Simon, The New Science of Management Decision (Evanston, IL: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1960).
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Special anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
Carter A. Daniel, MBA: The First Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998);
John A. Byrne, The Whiz Kids: The Founding Fathers of American Business—and the Legacy They Left Us (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1993);
Robert Gleeson, “The Rise of graduate management education in American universities, 1908–1970” (Ph.D. Diss., Carnegie-Mellon University, 1997);
Robert A. Gordon, and James E. Howell, Higher Education for Business (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959);
Robert R. Locke, Management and Higher Education since 1940: The Influence of America and Japan on West Germany, Great Britain, and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
See Anatol Rapoport on the Prisoner’s Dilemma for a discussion of how narrow definitions of rationality in terms of immediate self-interest exclude much that looks perfectly rational from a broader perspective. Anatol Rapoport and Albert M. Chammah, Prisoner’s Dilemma; A Study in Conflict and Cooperation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).
See Abbott in The Politics of Method for a fascinating discussion of “outcomes” (such as purchases or votes) in social science. Andrew Abbott, “The idea of outcome in U.S. Sociology,” in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Cowles Commission, “Decision Making under Uncertainty: Eleventh Progress Report,” in HSP, CMU Archives, box 6, folder 229 (March 1954); Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, “Fifth Report on the Project “Theory of Resources Allocation,” under Subcontract with the Rand Corporation,” in HSP, CMU Archives, box 6, folder 226 (July 1950);
Clifford Hildreth, The Cowles Commission in Chicago, 1939–1955 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986).
On the Behavioral Models Project at Columbia, see Angela M. O’Rand, “Mathematizing social science in the 1950s: The early development and diffusion of game theory,” in Toward a History of Game Theory: Supplement to the History of Political Economy, ed. E. Roy Weintraub (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).
See Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon; Daniel, MBA: The First Century; Robert Gleeson and Steven Schlossman, “George Leland Bach and the rebirth of graduate management education in the United States, 1945–1975,” Selections 11.3 (1995): 8–36.
On this topic, I draw in particular on: Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006);
Sonja Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Creative American: Cold War salons, social science, and the cure for modern society,” Isis 100.2 (2009): 219–262. Marga Vicedo, “Cold War emotions: The war over human nature,” this volume.
See, for example, Herbert Simon’s analyses of creative thinking: Herbert A. Simon, “Discovery, invention, and development: Human creative thinking,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 80.14 (1983): 4570–4571. On ideas about creativity in cognitive science more generally, see Cohen-Cole, “The Creative American: Cold War salons, social science, and the cure for modern society.”
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© 2012 Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens
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Heyck, H. (2012). Producing Reason. In: Solovey, M., Cravens, H. (eds) Cold War Social Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013224_6
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