The art of thinking · 6 · Judgment, action and error
Bounded rationality
Also known as: Bounded rationality (Herbert Simon), Limited rationality
German: begrenzte Rationalität
Bounded rationality is Herbert A. Simon’s concept that human decision makers are rational within the limits of the information they have, their cognitive capacity and the time available, and therefore look for solutions that are good enough rather than optimal.
- Cognitive psychology
- Judgment
- Decision making
In one sentence
Simon’s bounded rationality: people decide rationally within limits of information, capacity and time, and settle for good-enough solutions.
Example
A service technician with a stopped line doesn’t read the whole manual to find the optimal fix; they look for the first entry that matches the symptom. Troubleshooting pages are designed for that search.
What the research shows
Simon (1955) replaced the economic model of an optimizing decision maker with one that searches among alternatives until one meets an aspiration level — satisficing. Rationality is bounded by the environment as well as by the mind; Simon compared the two to the blades of a pair of scissors. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978. Gerd Gigerenzer’s ecological rationality developed the idea that simple heuristics can perform well in the right environments, while the heuristics-and-biases program emphasized their systematic errors.
Evidence status
Bounded rationality is a foundational concept rather than a single finding; it is supported by a large body of research on search, choice and heuristics. How to model the bounds — as costs, as heuristics, as constraints — differs between schools. The concept does not mean that people are irrational.
How it applies
Readers rarely read documentation completely; they search until something looks good enough. Information foraging theory and information scent, in the application glossary, describe how documentation can be found under these limits; the decision side is covered by satisficing and heuristics and biases.
External references
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Bounded Rationality”. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bounded-rationality/
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