Simon, Herbert - (b. 1916. Ph.D. Political Science, University of Chicago). About 1954, Simon and Newell conceived of using computer programming language to build theories of human symbolic behavior. Simon and his colleagues showed how a wide range of cognitive processes in problem solving and problem understanding can be explained in information-processing terms and modeled with computer programs.
Simon’s doctoral research on decision making in organizations, later expanded into Administrative Behavior (1947), brought him to psychology, and by the middle 1950s his major research interest lay in the psychology of problem solving. During this time he pioneered information-processing psychology with Allen Newell. About 1954, they conceived of using computer programming language to build theories of human symbolic behavior. Inventing (with J.C. Shaw) the first list-processing languages as tools for this task, they constructed and tested empirically a series of simulation programs, work subsequently synthesized in Human Problem Solving. Simon and his colleagues showed, in Models of Thought, how a wide range of cognitive processes in problem solving and problem understanding, concept attainment, language behavior, and language learning can be explained in information-processing terms and modeled with computer programs. To help institutionalize and diffuse these new scientific paradigms, Simon has played major administrative roles at Carnegie-Mellon University, and participated in the National Academy of Science, the National Research Council, and the President’s Science Advisory Committee. Simon has also been active in mathematical economics and organization theory, advancing the thesis that the economists’ assumption of ‘economic man’ claimed excessive powers for human mental processes and needed to be replaced by an empirically based theory of ‘bounded rationality.’ His research and its application to economic decision making earned him the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978.
Corsini, Raymond J., ed. (1994). Encyclopedia of psychology. John Wiley.& Sons, Inc. [bookstore]
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