Herbert Simon
Bounded Rationality and the Beginnings of Behavioral Science
Intro
Herbert Simon was an astounding thinker. His ideas spanned multiple disciplines, including behavioral science, economics, psychology and computer science. Driven by his insatiable curiosity and belief that knowledge that was taken for granted had to be more closely analyzed, Simon’s ideas revolutionized the way we think about decision-making.
Not afraid to question mainstream ideologies, Simon dispelled several pillars of traditional economics, which opened the door to behavioral economics. He changed people’s understanding of the term ‘rationality’ and tried to bring mathematical rigor to the social sciences. He believed that it was possible, through experimentation, to gain insight into the workings of the human mind.
Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
- Herbert Simon1
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
