Simon was a pioneer in information psychology and was active in the fields of mathematical economics and organization theory.
SIMON (Simon) Herbert
(1916-2001) - American economist, sociologist, psychologist, one of the founders of cognitive psychology. Studied at the University of Chicago (Bachelor of Arts, 1936, PhD, 1943), later defended Dr. dis. in law at the Montreal University of McGill (1970). professional activity started as a research assistant at the University of Chicago (1936-1938). From 1939 to 1942 - head of the educational department of the California University. Then he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology (assistant professor of political science, 1942-1945; associate professor, 1945-1947; professor, 1947-1949). At the same time, from 1945 to 1965 - Professor of Administration and Psychology at Carnegie University in Pittsburgh. Since 1965 - Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. From 1949 to 1960 - Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Management, from 1957 to 1977 - Dean high school industrial administration. Poch. dr row high fur boots of the USA and Europe. He received the ARA Award for Scientific Contribution (1969). Awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (1978). Has the J. Medison award American Association Political Science (1984). He started his career in economics and political sciences. After completing his education, he turned to the problem of making government decisions (Berkeley, University of California, 1939-1942). Conducted innovative developments on the application of quantitative methods in sociology, economics and management. During this period, Dr. dis. on organizational decision making, which was later published as a monograph (Administration behavior, N.Y., 1947). The development of cybernetics in the 1940s went parallel to the interests of S. in the field of decision-making, and he began to develop cybernetic models for the development of administrative decisions. In 1952, Mr.. S. - Consultant RAND Corporation, where he began his collaboration with Allen Newell. Having become acquainted with the electronic computers that appeared at that time, S. came to the conclusion that they could be used to reproduce human thinking. In 1955, together with A. Newell, he began work on programs that later had a huge impact on the development of cognitive psychology. Based on the computer metaphor of brain activity, a number of machine models of thinking have been created. Together with A. Newell and J. Shaw, using the results psychological research O. Zeltsa, S. developed the computer programs Logic Theorist and Universal Problem Solver, based on the assumption that human heuristic activity proceeds in the same way as the process of computing, or program execution. In his models, S. postulates the presence of one central processor (counter), which has access to the outside world, short-term and long-term memory. These models were tested on the material of proving geometric theorems, solving cryptoarithmetic problems and playing chess. However, S.'s program was much less successful in relation to the problems real life. Nevertheless, it continues to retain its relevance in relation to those aspects of this approach: the definition of a problem space, purposeful problem solving, and methods for solving problems out of context. Main works C: Administrative behavior. 1947, 1976; Public administration/ (with Smithburg D.W., Thompson V.A.), N.Y., 1950; Models: their uses and limitation (with A. Newell) // (Ed.), 1956; Models of men: social and rational. N.Y., 1957; The Shape of automation for men and management. N.Y., 1965; The sciences of the artifica, 1969; Human problem solving, 1972 (with A. Newell); Models of thought, New Haven, 1979; and others. In Russian. transl.: Processes of creative thinking // Psychology of thinking. M., 1965; Mechanisms that cause the desire for uniformity in groups, et al. / Mathematical methods in social sciences ah, M., 1973; Management in an organization, co-author, M., 1995. L.A. Karpenko, I.M. Kondakov,
The first works of the Nobel Prize winner, an outstanding American scientist in the field of social, political, economic and mathematical sciences, a specialist in problems of organizations and management Herbert Simon (1916 - 2001) were devoted to the preparation, adoption and implementation of management decisions. Believing that a decision is a choice by an employee of one of several possible alternatives of behavior, Simon considered organizations as systems in which people are decision-making mechanisms. The essence of the activities of managers, administrators, their power over subordinates was, in his opinion, in the creation of factual or value prerequisites on which the decisions of each member of the organization are based.
The first decision that any member of an organization makes is the decision to participate or not to participate in it. Simon believed that, by investing his labor or capital in an organization, each individual proceeds from the fact that the satisfaction that he will derive from this will be greater than that which he could receive by refusing to participate in this organization. If, considering the issue of his participation in the organization, the individual is guided by personal considerations, then after he makes a positive decision, personal goals gradually fade into the background and are subordinate to the goals of the organization. In the case when the mechanism of influence in the organization is established in such a way that creates a balance between motivation and contribution, in which all members of the organization are ready to actively participate in its activities, giving all their energy to the tasks of the organization, then such an organization has, according to Simon, a high moral level. The creation of such a balance is achieved in the process of identification of the individual with the organization, and although such identification is always limited by the individual's past experience and external influences, it is nevertheless accelerated by encouraging the loyalty of people to the organization. The function of identification is to create appropriate conditions, incentives that would encourage all members of the organization to identify personal interests and the interests of the organization and, therefore, make the decisions necessary for the latter.
Simon considered in detail the various constituent elements of the "mechanism of influence", among which he assigned the most important place to authority. He also explored other external influences: training, recommendations. The essence of Simon's concept is that managers must effectively use all forms of external influence in the name of manipulating the personality of the employee, transforming a person to such an extent that he performs the desired actions due to his own motivation, and not under the influence of received instructions.
Authority, according to Simon, is "the power to make decisions that direct the actions of others." Objecting to viewing authority as a "legal phenomenon" based on formal sanctions, he emphasized that a person in an organization would readily take orders due to a desire to ensure its goals were achieved and a psychological readiness to follow others. Simon emphasized the need to create conditions under which the exercise of "categorical authority" may be needed only to reverse the wrong decision.
In his works, Simon tried to combine the doctrine of "human relations" with a systematic approach to the organization of management. He drew an ideal diagram of the functioning of the organization, in which the activities of all its members are motivated by the desire to contribute to the effectiveness of the organization due to the optimal identification of personal and common goals. This, in his opinion, reduces the need to display authority only to making adjustments, since its use in the form of sanctions loses any significant significance. Simon stated that modern society gives more and more authority to "functional status" and less and less to hierarchy. From this point of view, members of the organization are increasingly accustomed to accepting the proposals of functional specialists, since there is, on the one hand, a belief in competence, and on the other, the good intentions of those in power.
Simon paid considerable attention to the problem of communication in organizational system. Communication was defined by him as any process by which the prerequisites for decision-making are transferred from one member of the organization to another. At the same time, he pointed to the two-way nature of communication: the flow of information to the center, where decisions are made, and the transfer of decisions from the center to the “periphery”. In Simon's words, the process of information transfer occurs "laterally (horizontally) throughout the organization." At the same time, he emphasized the importance of informal channels for the transmission of information.
Simon emphasized the importance of centralized decision making as a means of coordination, professional competence and responsibility. At the same time, he pointed out some of the shortcomings of centralization, manifested in a dysfunctional effect on motivation, delay in decision-making, diverting the attention of top management from important issues in favor of minor ones.
From Simon's point of view, the problems of centralization and decentralization do not exist apart from the decision-making process. Making decisions relating to the organization as a whole reflects the essence of centralized leadership. Because every decision maker has only "bounded rationality" (limited by their skills, habits, and reflexes, a concept of purpose that may diverge from those of the organization, and their degree of knowledge and awareness), those in a subordinate position are less degree than managers are able to make rational decisions from the point of view of the entire system.
- (Simon) (b. 1916), American economist and sociologist. Research in the field of management theory, modeling of social processes. Nobel Prize(1978). * * * SIMON Herbert SIMON (Simon) Herbert (June 15, 1916, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 9 ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary
Simon, Herbert- SIMON Herbert (born 1916), American economist and sociologist. Proceedings in the field of management theory, modeling of social processes, research of structures and decision-making processes in economic organizations. Nobel Prize … Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary
Herbert Simon Alexander Herbert A. Simon Date of birth: June 15, 1916 (19160615) Place of birth: Milwaukee Date of death: February 9 ... Wikipedia
Herbert Simon Alexander Herbert A. Simon Date of birth: June 15, 1916 (19160615) Place of birth: Milwaukee Date of death: February 9 ... Wikipedia
Herbert Simon Alexander Herbert A. Simon Date of birth: June 15, 1916 (19160615) Place of birth: Milwaukee Date of death: February 9 ... Wikipedia
Herbert Simon Alexander Herbert A. Simon Date of birth: June 15, 1916 (19160615) Place of birth: Milwaukee Date of death: February 9 ... Wikipedia
- (p. 1916). Simon was a pioneer in information psychology and was active in the fields of mathematical economics and organization theory... Psychological Encyclopedia
Simon is a surname. Notable speakers: Simon, Herbert American economist, Nobel laureate. Simon, David is an American journalist, screenwriter and producer. Simon, Chris Canadian ice hockey player. Simon ... Wikipedia
Herbert Simon Alexander Herbert A. Simon Date of birth: June 15, 1916 (19160615) Place of birth: Milwaukee Date of death: February 9 ... Wikipedia
Books
- Artificial Sciences, G. Simon, Herbert Simon - one of the most prominent American experts in organization theory, management theory, decision theory, heuristic programming. The book "Sciences of the Artificial" ... Category: Mathematical cybernetics Series: In the world of science and technology Publisher: Mir,
- Artificial Sciences, G. Simon, Herbert Simon - one of the most prominent American experts in organization theory, management theory, decision theory, heuristic programming. The Science of Artificial… Category: Databases Series: The Great Cities Publisher: Editorial URSS, Manufacturer:
SIMON, HERBERT ALEXANDER(Simon, Herbert Alexander) (1916-2001), American scientist who studied the principles and processes of decision-making in various areas of human activity and obtained fundamental results in many precise and humanities- from mathematics and economics, where his contribution was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978, to psychology and artificial intelligence. Simon was born on June 15, 1916 in Milwaukee (Wisconsin) in the family of an electrical engineer. From 1933 to 1936 he studied at the University of Chicago, majoring in political science, but also studied economics, logic, physics and biophysics; among his immediate teachers were R. Carnap and G. Lasswell. In the next few years he was engaged in research on the activities of municipal authorities, in 1939-1942 he led a research group at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1943 he received a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago. After completing his research grant at Berkeley, he returned to the Lake District, where he worked at the Illinois Institute of Technology and regularly participated in "incubator" seminars. Nobel laureates- The Coles Commission on Economic Research, which was based at the time at the University of Chicago.
In 1947, the first of Simon's classic books came out of print - Administrative behavior (Administrative Behavior, 4th ed. 1997). In addition to exploring the principles of how organizations function, it outlined the concept of "bounded rationality" (bounded rationality), which, three decades later, brought Simon the Nobel Prize. The idea of "limited rationality" does not belong to the economic, but to the socio-psychological and even anthropological field and lies in the fact that when searching for and making a decision, a person in many, but under certain conditions and in most cases, does not strive for the best solution, but is limited to the first one. , albeit not an optimal satisfactory solution.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Simon participated in the creation of the Office for Economic Cooperation, which coordinated the Marshall Plan (later this office will be transformed into the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and also was engaged in the economic justification for the development of nuclear energy and research in the field of mathematical economics .
In 1949, Simon became a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he helped found the School of Industrial Management. At the Carnegie Institute (since 1967 - Carnegie Mellon University) all his further scientific life; together with A. Newell, the scientist played a big role in the transformation of this initially little-known educational institution to a prestigious university and one of the leading American and world centers of computer science, directly participating in the creation of the School of Informatics and the Department of Psychology.
Remaining committed to introducing exact methods into the social sciences, at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, Simon came to the conclusion that it was expedient to study search and decision-making processes by computer simulation. In 1952 he met A. Newell at the RAND Corporation. At first, based on the ideas of A. Turing and K. Shannon, they became interested in creating a program for playing chess, and a little later they set out to model a person's ability to prove logical and mathematical theorems. This task, which Rand J. ("Cliff") Shaw, a systems programmer, joined in, was quickly solved. The Logic Theorist model was created in December 1955 (Newell had moved to Pittsburgh by that time, while remaining a RAND employee), in the summer of 1956 it was implemented in the form of a computer program, and on September 11, 1956 the model was reported at a symposium on information theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, Simon and Newell, with the participation of Shaw, developed a number of other programs that modeled such types of human activity that were considered obviously intellectual. They also returned to creating a chess program, but the main product was the "General Problem Solver" (General Problem Solver), which embodied the general model of problem solving. In 1972, when artificial intelligence was a recognized discipline, the results of this period were summarized in the book by Newell and Simon Human problem solving (Human Problem Solving).
The work of Simon and Newell in the 1950s had an extremely important impact on the development of computer science and computer technology. They set the so-called symbolic information processing paradigm, which is based on the hypothesis that human thinking is most adequately modeled as basically a sequential and algorithmic operation with some symbols that somehow reflect reality. Human thinking is provided by the action of one of the varieties of what Simon and Newell called the material symbol system (physical symbol system), at a certain level of consideration, fundamentally identical for humans and computers (this thesis is called a computer metaphor, or the concept of incorporeal intelligence).
When in the 1970s artificial intelligence realized that in real thought processes, along with the general principles of thinking, specific knowledge also plays an important role, the semantic structure of natural language began to be considered as one of the sources of this knowledge. Thus, Simon, in a huge creative heritage which there were practically no linguistic works proper, for several decades determined the productive interaction between linguists and representatives of computer science.
In the late 1950s, Simon continued to focus on economics and management theory, publishing books Organizations (Organizations, 1958, together with J. March) and new science about management decisions (The New Science of Management Decision, 1960), but since the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, the problems of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and later also logic, methodology and psychology of science began to occupy an increasingly significant place in his research. The beginning of this shift, which Simon himself saw as a perfectly logical development of his interest in decision-making processes and his personal contribution to their scientific study, was laid by the book Human Models (Models of Man, 1957). In 1969, the first edition of Simon's book was published. Artificial Sciences (The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed. 1996, Russian per. 1972), which examined in detail the epistemological functions of computer modeling as a research method; this book remains one of the main methodological works on "computer science" to this day.
In 1979 Simon published the first and in 1989 the second volume. Thinking patterns (Models of Thought). In the early 1980s, within the framework of his concept of artificial sciences, he substantiated the status of a new scientific discipline- cognitive science that emerged as a theoretical component of artificial intelligence and at the same time an interdisciplinary synthesis of the sciences of human thinking. Books were devoted to the interdisciplinary study of scientific discoveries Opening patterns (Models of Discovery, 1977) and co-written Scientific discoveries: computer research of creative processes (Scientific Discoveries: Computational Explorations of Cognitive Processes, 1987). In 1982, works on "bounded rationality" were collected and published ( Models of Bounded Rationality, in 2 volumes), in 1997 the third volume was published.
Pavel Parshin
Interests: artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences.
Education: B.A., University of Chicago, 1936; doctor, University of Chicago, 1943.
Professional activity: Richard King Mellon University, Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University; honorary doctorate from Yale University, 1963, Case Institute of Technology, 1963, Marquette University, 1981, Columbia University, 1983, Gustavus Adolf College, 1984; honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Chicago, 1964, McGill University, 1970, University of Michigan, 1978, University of Pittsburgh, 1979; member of the National Academy of Sciences, 1967; honorary doctorate from Landa University, 1968; award "For scientific contribution" ARA, 1969; Doctor of Economics, Erasmus University, The Netherlands, 1973; Touring Award, Computer Technology Association, 1975; honorary member of the American Economic Association, 1976; Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, 1978; doctor, Paul Valery University, 1984; American Political Science Association James Madison Award, 1984.
Major Publications
1947 Administrative Behavior. Macmillan. (3rd edn. Free Press. 1976.)
1956 Rational choice and the structure of the environment. psychological review, 63,129-138.
1958 Element of a theory of human problem solving. psychological review, 65, 151-166 (with A. Newell and J. C. Shaw).
1961 Computer stimulation of human thinking. science, 134, 2011-2017 (with A. Newell).
1962 A theory of the serial position effect. British Journal of Psychology, 53, 307-320 (with E.A. Feigenbaum).
1963 Human acquisition of concepts for sequential patterns. psychological review, 70,534-546 (with K. Kotovosky).
1967 Motivational and emotional controls of cognition. psychological Review, 74, 29-39.
1969 Information-processing analysis of perceptual processes in problem solving. psychological review, 76, 473-483 (with M. Barenfeld).
1972 Human Problem Solving. Prentice Hall (with A. Newell).
1973 Perception in chess. cognitive Psychology, 4, 55-81 (with W. G. Chase).
1979 Models of Thought. Yale University Press.
1981 The Sciences of the Artificial(2nd edn). MIT Press.
1984 protocol analysis. MIT Press (with A. Ericsson).
Anderson J. R. (1985) Cognitive Psychology aha its Implications. freeman.
Nisbett R. E. and Wilson T. D. (1977) Telling more than we know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84,231-259.
Posner M. I. (ed.) (1989) Foundations of Cognitive Science. Bradford.
Sheehy N. P. and Chapman A. J. (eds) (1995) Cognitive Science, vol. 2 Edward Elgar
Herbert Simon began his education and career in economics and political science. During his studies, he was involved in leisure research in Milwaukee, and after graduation he turned to the problem of public decision-making - first as an assistant to Clarence E. Ridley (1936-9) at the International Association of City Administration, and then as director of administrative studies (193 9-42) at the UC Berkeley Bureau of Public Administration. During this period, Simon wrote his doctoral dissertation on organizational decision making, which was later published under the title Administrative Behavior(1947). From 1942 to 1949 he was on the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology and headed the department of political and social sciences. The development of cybernetics during World War II paralleled Simon's interest in decision-making processes, and he began to create models of administrative decision-making. In 1949, he entered graduate school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and engaged in empirical research in the field of organizational decision making, without leaving scientific work. He became a consultant to the research laboratory of the RAND Corporation (circa 1952), which led to an important collaboration with Allen Newell.
Research in organizational decision making led Simon to another topic, problem solving; having become acquainted with electronic computers, he came to the conclusion that they could be used to reproduce human thinking. Taking advantage of computers and protocols of think-aloud sessions, which were the main research tools, he, together with Allen Newell, began work in 1955 on a program that became, in some way, a revolution in cognitive psychology. First, they were able to demonstrate that computers could be programmed to solve problems using heuristic search. This was followed by a program that explained many of the phenomena of verbal learning using the methods of serial anticipation and pair associations.
While studying the processes of human problem solving, Newell and Simon developed several concepts that had a profound impact not only on cognitive science, but also on other sciences. They suggested that the process of solving a problem involves the selection of operators (means) that can be applied to given state specific problem in order to move it to the final state (goals). The "means-ends" analysis is carried out within the problem space, including potential states of knowledge and operators that transform one state of knowledge into another. Means-ends analysis places high demands on controlled data processing: the end state and significant intermediate states must be considered together. The embodiment of Newell and Simon's theory in a computer program became the exemplary model for numerous subsequent attempts to formally concretize information processes defining thinking. Their computer program thinks rationally, but without resorting to deductive logic.
In the 1960s, Simon worked with Barenfeld, Gilmartin, and Chase on the problem of the place of knowledge in the implementation of skills such as chess and actualization. professional knowledge using key concepts. In another study with Hayes, Simon studied how people understand verbal instructions. His research then focused on reproducing and explaining the processes scientific discovery and analysis of the processes of assimilation of knowledge in physics, mathematics and other school subjects. Thus, trying step by step to expand the range of cognitive processes that could be explained in terms of the informational paradigm, Simon began to use an ever wider set of cognitive tasks that people face in school and in the course of professional activity.
Simon and Newell's research revealed the relative similarities seen in problem solving strategies. They suggested that this was due to the fact that the information processing system in humans is not as complex and sophisticated as is often believed; humans have a few basic heuristics for solving a wide range of problems. For example, Chase and Simon have shown that 50,000 visual configurations are enough to describe all the positions that occur on the board when playing chess. Thus, the ability to determine a specific configuration can be used as a strong basis for planning a sequence of moves. Professional chess players learn to recognize typical configurations as single blocks of perception. When thinking about a certain position, the professional will remember six or seven configurations, each containing three to five pieces. In the realm of informational working memory, there are six or seven points at the same time, and the intellectual ability of a chess player can be explained in terms of memory through perceptual learning.
However, for all its impressiveness, Simon's program has been applied mainly to artificial puzzle-type problems, and much less successfully to "real life" problems. Nevertheless, three aspects of this approach continue to be relevant, namely: the definition of the problem space, purposeful problem solving, and out-of-context problem solving methods.
