Simon on Social Identification: Two Connections with Bounded Rationality

Herbert Simon

The twelfth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Rouslan Koumakhov

Social identifications are one of Herbert Simon’s most recurrent themes. Starting with Administrative Behavior (hereafter, AB) (Simon, 1947/1997), he investigates that theme throughout his scientific work on an impressive number of occasions. Perhaps it is section 3, entitled Perception and identifications, of chapter 6 (“Cognitive Limits on Rationality”), in March and Simon (1958/1993), that symbolizes Simon’s main concern in this issue – its connection with human rationality and emphasis on every individual’s multiple “belongings” to social groups (in the broad sense, i.e. from primary groups to formal organizations to the whole of society). From this general standpoint, “identification with groups is the major selective mechanism controlling human attention in organizations (and elsewhere) (…)” (Simon, 1993, p. 137). Accordingly, social identification is a process allowing people to stabilize their anticipations, to coordinate perceptions and interpretations of reality. While this tendency to identify with groups appears necessary to build and maintain social systems, it also leads to mimetic opinions and behavioral conformity.

Compared with the notion of bounded rationality, however, Simon’s analysis of identification was only taken up to a limited extent by the social and human sciences that he so strongly influenced. Because his analysis is complex and appeals to major concepts developed in related disciplines, this begs the question of the exact place of social identification in Simon’s account of decision process and social interaction. My argument is that, in this account, not only is there a strong connection between bounded rationality and social identification, but also that such connection implies value systems and cognitive representations. Considered in this manner, the problem of identification is central in Simon’s decision-making and social theory, with its focus on mental states and understanding reality.

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Sociology and Classical Liberalism

sociology

We venture to say that self-reinforcing sorting mechanisms now make the discipline unapproachable by anyone who is unabashedly classically liberal.

— full article.

This was all true (and patently obviously so) even thirty years ago. I, however, got very lucky — I had the amazing Paul Hirst as a tutor. Almost ten years ago I wrote: “Paul was the only member in the School of Politics and Sociology that “got it”. He never allowed his own ideological predelictions to colour his approach to students’ work – he relished giving a fair and insightful account of positions he didn’t hold to, which I noticed confused students who were there precisely because of Paul’s viewpoint. Indeed, he once told me that he thought it tiresome that the departmental profile was so ideologically homogenous.” Where are the Pauls of today? 

Though he began as a Marxist, his ideas helped to provide the intellectual scaffolding for New Labour. His irreverent approach to conventional political ideas gained him many admirers who, fired by his spirit, went on to break new ground of their own. Above all, he was a fierce egalitarian, an evangelist of honesty and the enemy of can’t.

— The Guardian

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The Real Adam Smith

adam smith

What can a man with a plain name who lived over 200 years ago tell us about life today? Who was The Real Adam Smith? And why should we care? In this two-hour, two-part documentary, Swedish author, commentator and Cato Senior Fellow Johan Norberg explores Adam Smith’s life, his ideas about morality and economics, and how the concepts he discussed in his books and lectures are still relevant today. (H/T Jason Potts).

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Walker Percy Wednesday 82

walker percy

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Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good. No, it’s because something has happened to us which is so bad that we don’t even have a word for it. Sin isn’t the word. Your Christ didn’t exactly foresee anything like this, did he? Hurricanes, which are very bad things, somehow neutralize the other bad thing which has no name, so that one can breathe easy, become free once again to sin or not to sin. The couple I spoke of became free and happy only during the passage of the eye of the hurricane, that is, capable of both love and hate (ordinarily they were numb, moved like ghosts), of honesty and lying.

*****

No, it was so much simpler than that. It was simply that there is such a thing as a beautiful day to go out into, a road to travel, good food to eat when you’re hungry, wine to drink when you’re thirsty, and most of all, 99 percent of all, no: all of all: a woman to love.

*****

There are only three ways to go. One is their way out there, the great whorehouse and fagdom of America. I won’t have it. The second way is sweet Baptist Jesus and I won’t have that. Christ, if heaven is full of Southern Baptists, I’d rather rot in hell with Saladin and Achilles. There is only one way and we could have had it if you Catholics hadn’t blown it: the old Catholic way.

*****

If I were a Jew, I’d know what to do. It’s easy. I’d be in Israel with the sabras. They’re my kind. The only difference between them and the Crusaders is that the Crusaders lost. Ha, isn’t that a switch, come to think of it—that the only Crusaders left in the entire Western world are the Israelis, the very Jews who huddled and shrank and grinned and nodded for two thousand years? The Jews are lucky. They know who they are and they have Israel. We have to make our own Israel, but we know who we are.

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The Morality of Freedom/Morals by Agreement

liberalism

It’s been thirty years since arguably the last great works of liberal political philosophy in the analytical tradition appeared, setting aside Rawls’ Political Liberalism from 1993. The Morality of Freedom is freely available  — click image.

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With all this talk of Shakespeare Cervantes is overlooked

Cervantes

His words still shape our consciousness, even if we fail to read him. This is not due to some hackneyed idealism (“tilting at windmills”), but rather to his pervasive impact on the genre that taught us to think like moderns: the novel. He pioneered the representation of individual subjectivity and aspiration, which today undergirds the construction of agency in any narrative, whether in novels, films, television, or the daily self-fashioning by millions of users of social media. Thus William Egginton recently bestowed upon him the title, “the man who invented fiction.” He discovered the fictive within each of us. — Cervantes’s pen silenced today

IND119216 Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra (1547-1615) 1600 (oil on panel) by Jauregui y Aguilar, Juan de (c.1566-1641); Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain; Index; Spanish, out of copyright

Rick’s Picks smokra

gastronomy

Time for something gastronomical. Without doubt the best pickled Okra I’ve had. Double the price of your standard supermarket bottle, but really worth it. And from Brooklyn! Really smokey, the Islay of pickled veg.

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Distributed Selves: Personal Identity and Extended Memory Systems

extended mind

Richard Heersmink’s new EM paper.

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Big News for “Pops” Aficionados

Louis Armstrong

The Louis Armstrong House Museum has acquired the only known film of the great jazz musician in a recording studio, recording the 1959 album, “Satchmo Plays King Oliver.” This exclusive video depicts Armstrong and his All Stars recording the master take of “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” as well as silent footage of them listening to the playback. Also featured in the clip are Trummy Young, trombone, Peanuts Hucko, clarinet, Billy Kyle, piano, Mort Herbert, bass and Danny Barcelona, drums. The original album was produced for Audio Fidelity records by Sid Frey, who commissioned the film to be made. It was discovered in a storage facility in 2012 and was brought to the Armstrong House with help of Frey’s daughter, Andrea Bass.
Fun things to look out for:
*There’s no sheet music, forcing Louis to make up a few lyrics (“hot mamas!”)
*Watch for Louis breaking himself up after quoting “Pennies from Heaven” during the opening trumpet chorus.
*Armstrong often said when he scatted, he’d move his fingers as if he was playing the trumpet; watch the dramatic hand gestures during the vocal!
*We can’t hear the playback, but Louis looks satisfied. (That’s Dukes of Dixieland manager Joe Delaney sitting next to Louis.) And dig those shorts!
*This was all filmed at the famous Radio Recorders in Los Angeles, a great glimpse into a world-renowned studio.

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Organizational Decisions in the Lab

Herbert Simon

The eleventh in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Massimo Egidi

“Bounded Rationality” is a label that gathers the most important advancements of Herbert Simon’s scientific production. His fundamental contributions to cognitive psychology and to the theory of problem solving were developed jointly, each being nurtured by the discoveries emanating from the other discipline. I will briefly review some steps on the path to the creation of the theory of bounded rationality, in order to introduce to the issue of organizational decision making, and the associated laboratory experiments.

From the very start, Simon built the idea of bounded rationality on close observation of the behavior of employees and managers in large organizations. In Administrative Behavior, published in 1947, he came to the realization that organization’s internal mechanisms, insofar as they are characterized by division of labour and cooperation, are the product of a complex activity of goal achieving. Important progresses in this direction were achieved in the fifties, through some empirical analyses of managerial decisions that he conducted at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of Carnegie Mellon. Among them, of primary interest is the research he conducted jointly with Cyert and Trow in which they realize that beyond the routine decisions, managers make non-repetitive decisions that require solving problems in ill-defined conditions. (Cyert, Simon and Trow, 1956, p. 238)

The field analysis of problem solving sowed the seeds of theory of bounded rationality. In Organizations (1958) March and Simon moved forward from the notion of problem solving as individual activity to the notion of organizational problem solving, with a clear recognition of the evolutionary processes of organizational adaptation and organizational learning within business corporations. The identification of these processes was enhanced by the assumption that the division of labour can be considered a collective problem solving activity. Thus, the development of a deeper theory of problem solving became crucial in explaining human decisions and for the creation of new ideas in theory of organization: in particular the notion of organizational routines within business firms, and of their evolution.

At the time he was finishing his work on Organizations, Simon began his collaboration with Allen Newell. Human Problem Solving, which they published together in 1972, is a bridge between computation, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Here Simon went beyond the notion of “computation” as a human activity that relates means to ends, replacing it with the notion of symbolic manipulation and deepening the various connected mental abilities — memorization, evocation, categorization, abstraction, judgment.

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