Simon (1985) Human Nature in Politics

8/13/2019 Simon (1985) Human Nature in Politics

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Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science

Herbert A. Simon

The American Political Science Review, Vol. 79, No. 2. (Jun., 1985), pp. 293-304.

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Human Nature in Politics:The Dialogue of Psychology with Political ScienceHERBERT. SIMON

Carnegie-MellonUniversityThis article compares tw o theories of human ra tionality that have found application in politicalscience: procedural, bounded rationality from contemporary cognitive psychology, and global, sub-stantive rationality from econom ics. Using examples drawn from the recent literature of politicalscience, it examines the relative rolesplayed by the rationality principle and by auxiliary assumptions(e.g. , assumptions about the content of actors goals) in explaining human behavior in political con-texts, and concludes that the m ode/pred ictions rest primarily on the auxiliary assumptions rather thanderiving from the rationality principle.The ana@sis implies that the principle of rationality, unless accompanied by extensive empiricalresearch to identify the correct auxiliary assumptions, has little power to make valid predictions aboutpolitical phenotnena.

This article is concerned with the nature ofhuman reason and the implications of contem-porary cognitive psychology for political scienceresearch that employs the concept of rationalbehavior. I shall begin with a bit of history, writ-ten from a rather personal viewpoint, to provide asetting for the discussion.The older and/or more scholarly among youwill recognize the essay's title as having beenplagiarized from Graham Wallas, whose seminalbook, Human Nature in Politics, appeared in1908. When I began graduate study, in the middle1930s, that book, along with Walter Lippmann'sPublic Opinion, was still wholly fresh, and bothstood out as harbingers of the "behavioral revolu-tion" that was then just getting under way at theUniversity of Chicago.Not that we graduate students thought of our-selves as participants in a scientific revolution.The realities of the political process had long sincereplaced the formal legal structure of political in-stitutions as the main subject for study in politicalscience-at least at the University of Chicago.Merriam's studies of power, Gosnell's quantita-tive methods, Lasswell's psychoanalytic probesseemed to us merely (paraphrasing Clausewitz)"the continuation of political realism by othermeans.'''

The present essay is a slightly revised version of theJames Madison lecture presented by the author at theAnnual Meeting of the American Political ScienceAssociation in Washington, D.C., 1984.See David Eastman s perceptive account of this his-tory in his article on political science in the International

I was little prepared, therefore, for the violenceof the polemic pro and con "behavioralism" thatechoed over the land in the first two decades afterWorld War 11. Nowadays, my periodic soundingsin TheAmerican PoliticalScience Review reassureme that this civil strife in the profession is largelyover, and that the behavioral revolution is nowseen as continuity rather than discontinuity in thedevelopment of political science. I am not sure itwould even qualify, in today's revisionist view, asone of Thomas Kuhn's major paradigm shifts.Perhaps what we were doing was not revolution-ary science at all, but just everyday normalscience.This is probably the right moment, while I amalluding to behavioralism, to record a culpa meafor my part in popularizing that awkward andsomewhat misleading term, It appeared, ofcourse, in the title of Administrative Behavior(Simon, 1947/1976a), and also in the title of mychief epistle to the economists, A BehavioralModel of Rational Choice," published in theQuarterly Journal of Economics in 1955. How-ever, I doubt that I was the main culprit. Thathonor belongs to the Ford Foundation, which atthat same time introduced and diligently popular-ized the phrase "behavioral sciences."Whatever its origins, the term was picked upwith enthusiasm-as an epithet-by the oppo-nents of behavioralism, who frequently employedit as though it were synonymous with theBehaviorism then rampant in the discipline of~ s ~ c h o l o g ~ .n fact, there was never any substan-tive connection between the two labels, and muchof what went on in political science, sociology,economics, and anthropology under the heading


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The American Political Science Reviewby the psychological Behaviorists if they had beenaware of it-which they mainly weren't.However, my aim here is not to reminisce aboutold battles. We should rejoice that political scien-tists are devoting all their efforts t o advancing thescience, and we should d o nothing to encourage arenewal of the Methodenstreit. Instead, I shalloffer a com mentary on the role of the rationalityprinciple in recent p~ lit ic al cience research.I emphasize that this is a comm entary and not anew piece of substantive research. The basicvalues for political science to which I and my con-temporaries were and are committed includesound empirical data as the foundation for theoryand for no rmative recomm endations; new sourcesof data including polls, structured interviews, andsystematic samples; the use of statistics, mathe-matics, and computer simulation where appropri-ate as tools for data analysis and the ory construc-tion; and the analysis of phenom ena in terms ofbasic categories like power, decision making,rationality, and systems.The research on which I shall comment exem-plifies those values: it is empirically based,employing many different kinds of data-gatheringmethods, often uses mathematical and o ther for-mal techniques, and is sophisticated in its use oftheory. My commentary will not touch on any ofthose aspects of the work except the last, and inparticular its employment of ideas derived fromthe theory of human rationality.The commentary will take us through threemain topics. First, I shall have to say somethingabout the two main forms of theories of humanrationality that prevail in social science today-the one of them having its center in cognitive psy-chology, the other in economics. Next, I shallconsider the implications, for the balance inpolitical science between rationalism (or a prior-ism) and empiricism, of adopting one o r the otherof these two paradigms of rationality. In par-ticular , I will argue tha t there is a natural alliancebetween empiricism and the psychological versionof rationality, on the one hand, and an alliancebetween rationalism and the economic version ofrationality, on the other. Finally, I will commenton the balance between reason and passion-radical irrationality-in political affairs .

The Forms of RationalityThe term rational denotes behavior tha t is

appropriate to specified goals in the context of agiven ~ i tu a t i o n . ~f the characteristics of the

2F or a mor e extensive discussion of the concepts of

choosing organism are ignored, and we consideronly those constraints that arise from the externalsituation, then we may speak of substantive orobjective rationality, that is, behavior that can beadjudged objectively to be optimally adapted tothe situation.On the other hand, if we take into account thelimita tions of knowledge and com puting power ofthe choosing organism, then we may find it in-capable of making objectively optim al choices. If,however, it uses methods of choice that are aseffective as its decision-making and problem-solving means permit, we may speak of pro-cedural or bounded rationality, that is, behaviorthat is adaptive within the constraints imposedboth by the external situation and by the capaci-ties of the decision maker.The terms procedural and substantivewere, of course, borrowed from constitutionallaw, in analogy with the concepts of proceduraland substantive due process, the former judgingfairness by the procedure used to reach a result,the latter by the substance of the result itself. Inthe same way, we can judge a person to be ra-tional who uses a reasonable process for choosing;or, alternatively, we can judge a person to berational who arrives at a reasonable choice.There is a fundam ental difference between sub-stantive and procedural rationality. To deduce thesubstantively, or objectively, rational choice in agiven situation, we need to know only the choos-ing organism's goals and the objective characteris-tics of the situation. We need to know absolutelynothing else about th e organism, nor would suchadditional knowledge be of any use to us, for itcould not affect the objectively rational behaviorin any way.To deduce the procedurally or boundedly ra-tional choice in a situation, we must know thechoosing organism's goals, the information andconceptualization it has of the situation, and itsabilities to draw inferences from th e inform ationit possesses. We need know nothing about theobjective situation in which the organism findsitself, except insofar as that situation influencesthe subjective representation.If we review the history of political science overthe past 40 years, I believe we will see that it wasmainly the p rocedural view of rationality that wasembraced by behavioralism, but that during thepast two decades this view has received growingcompetition from the substantive view. AnthonyDowns's Economic Theory of Democracy pub-lished in 1957 may be used to date the first nudg-i n g ~ f this new camel into the tent.I should now like to develop a little further thefundam ental characteristics and theoretical struc-


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Hum an Nature in Politicsseparately or jointly, in the study of politicalbehavior.Procedural Rationality and Cognitive Psychology

A central theme for G raham W allas in HumanNature in Politics was the interplay of the rationaland nonrational components of human behaviorin politics. That, of course, was also a centraltheme for Harold Lasswell in Psychopathologyand Politics (1934) and World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935). But while Lasswell's psy-chological apparatus comes largely from Freud,Wallas acknowledges as his principal mentorWilliam James. Although Lasswell was concernedwith borderline and not-so-borderline pathology,Wallas was interested in the ubiquitous workingsof instinct, ignorance, and emotion in normalbehavior. W allas, like his mentor William James,is the more closely attuned to the contemporaryorientation in psychology.What is that orientation? I expressed skep-ticism, earlier, that political science has experi-enced, since World War 11, any change thatdeserves being called a revolution. I have n o suchdoubts about the field of psychology. Cognitivepsychology, in th e past 30 years, has undergone aradical restructuring, from a severe Behaviorism(no relation, remind you, t o behavioralism) to aframework that views thinking as informationprocessing.In psychology, Behaviorism carefully avoidedspeaking abou t w hat went on inside the head-itpreferred t o stick to the observable facts of stimulian d responses. It preferred rats to hum ans as sub-jects in its experiments, presumably because ratscould not be induced to give unacceptable intro-spective accounts of their mental experiences.Even the term cognitive was eschewed, as im-plying an illicit mentalism.Tod ay, all of these barriers ar e down. The termcognition is uttered openly an d proudly torefer t o the human thought processes and to dis-tinguish them from th e processes of sensation andemotion. Most experiments use human subjects,and m any instruct the subjects to speak aloud asthey perform the experimental tasks, the tape-recorded protocols from such sessions being nowregarded as wholly objective and analyzable da ta?Theories, in modern cognitive psychology, are ex-pected to provide detailed descriptions of the in-formation processes that go on in the huma n headwhen it is performing problem solving and othertasks in the l a b ~ r a t o r y . ~

See Ericsson and Sim on (1984).

Within this new paradigm, cognitive psychol-ogy has made great strides toward understandinghow an information processing system like thehuman brain solves problems, makes decisions,remembers, and learns. That understanding hasadvanced so far that psychology is no longerlimited to dealing with toy tasks-puzzles andnonsense syllables-in the laboratory, bu t cangive rather impressive accounts of adult per-formance in professional-level tasks: makingmedical diagnoses, solving physics and mathe-matics problems at high school and college level,learning new mathematics and chemistry, andeven making new scientific discoveries, to men-tion just a few exampies.As examples of explicit applications of the newtheories to political science, I can mention themodels of public budget-making behavior con-structed by Crecine (1969) and Gerwin (1969) andtheir students, and Carbonell's (1979) ingeniousGoldwater machine, which predicts theresponse of an appropriately specified politicalfigure to a situation or set of events. Later, I willcite a number of other accounts of proceduralrationality at w ork in the political process, but inmost of these the appeal to cognitive theory andresearch is only implicit.The human capabilities for rational behaviorthat are described by contemporary cognitive psy-chology are very congenial to the paradigm ofbounded rationality as that is described in Administrative Behavior. Th e models of problem solvingdescribe a person w ho is limited in com putationalcapacity, and who searches very selectivelythrough large realms of possibilities in order todiscover what alternatives of action are available,and w hat the consequences of each of these alter-natives are. The search is incomplete, often in-adequate, based on uncertain information andpartial ignoran ce, and usually terminated with thediscovery of satisfactory, not optimal, courses ofaction.To understand the behavior of this kind ofproblem solver, who is provided in advance with aknowledge of neither alternatives nor conse-quences-and who may even discover what his orher goals are in the course of the problem-solvingprocess-it is necessary to specify wha t the prob-lem solver wants, knows, and can compute.Within the framework of these conditionalities,the mere assumption of rationality provides littlebasis for the prediction of behavior. To be ofmuch use, that assumption must be supplementedby considerable empirical knowledge about thedecision maker.Substantive Rationality and Economics


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96 Th e American Political Science Review Vol. 9extensively developed in modern cognitive psy-chology, so substantive, objective rationalityfinds its principal base in neoclassical economicsand stat is tical decision t h e ~ r y . ~he two concep-tions of rationality are radically different. Thefoun dation for the theory of objective rationalityis the assumptio n th at every actor possesses a util-ity function that induces a consistent orderingamo ng all alternative choices tha t the actor faces,and, indeed, that he or she always chooses thealternative with the highest utility.If the choice situation involves uncertainties,the theory further assumes that the actor willchoose th e alternative for which the expected util-ity is the highest. By expected utility of an alter-native is meant the average of the utilities of thedifferent possible outcomes, each weighted by theprobability that the outcome will ensue if thealternative in question is chosen.The theory of objective rationality assumesnothing ab ou t the actor's goals. Th e utility func-tion can take any form that defines a consistentordering of preferences. N or does the theory pos-tulate anything about the way in which the actormakes probability estimates of uncertain events;in fact one version of the theory, the so-calledsubjective expected utility, or SEU, theory, ex-plicitly denies that these probabilities are to beidentified with objective probabilities of theevents, determined by some outside observer. Inthis on e respect, the label objective fo r this ver-sion of the theory must be qualified.In principle (i.e., in a w holly idealized labora-tory setting), it should be possible to obtain in-dependent evidence about the n ature an d shape ofany particular person's utility function , as well asevidence of the p robabilities that person assigns t oevents. In practice, this is completely infeasible.In fact, when such experiments have been run, ithas generally been foun d that human subjects donot possess consistent utility functions or prob-ability assignments.eIn app lication, therefore, auxiliary assumptionsabout utility and expectations must usually besupplied before the theory of objective rationalitycan be applied to real situations. In economicapplications, for example, it is customary to iden-tify the utility function of a firm with its profit,and to assume that actors generally are trying tomaxim ize economic well-being-perhaps someweighted average of income and leisure. In appli-cations to political science, it may be assumed thatthe goal is to maximize power, or to maximizeeconomic well-being as a function of the policies

pursued by the gov enm ent. (I will have more tosay later about the assumptions that are maderegarding political utility in applying the prin-ciple of rationality to problems in politicalscience.)In th e same way, in applying the theory of ob-jective rationality to real-world behavior, eitheruncertainty must be ignored, or auxiliary pos-tulates must be provided to define the expecta-tion-forming process. In contemporary econom-ics, for example, the very lively rational expecta-tions schoo l, whose leaders include such figuresas Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent, assumesthat each economic actor has a more or less ac-curate model of th e economic system, and expectsthat system to proceed toward its equilibrium inthe near future. Of course, there is much doubtwhether this particular assumption abou t the for-mation of expectations bears any close resem-blance to the reality, and a majority of neo-classical economists have different, and simpler,beliefs about how economic actors cope withuncertainty.When neoclassical economics in its purest f ormaddresses itself exclusively to questions of theexistence, stability, and Pareto optimality ofequilibrium, it can generally get along without in-troducing auxiliary assumptions a bout the utilityfunction o r the n ature of th e expectation-formingprocesses. In fact, it usually finesses the latter byignoring uncertainty. T he price tha t is paid is thatthe conclusions reached by this kind of analysisare extremely general and abstract: roughly, tha tunder conditions of perfect competition, the eco-nomic system has a stable equilibrium, and thatthis equilibrium is, indeed, Pareto optimal (noteveryone can simultaneously be made better offtha n the equilibrium).When economists want to draw conclusionsabout nonequilibrium phenomena, matters getstickier. T he theory o f business cycles provides a nimportant illustration of the difficulties.' Theeconomic theory of Keynes and that of neo-classical economists like Friedman or Lucas areonly inches, not miles, apart. Most of Keynes'sgeneral theory can be (an d ha s been) interpretedas an exercise in quite orthodox neoclassicalreasoning-except at one or two critical points,the most important being the supply of labor. Atthese points economic actors depart from objec-tive rationality a nd su ffer from persistent illusionsor confusions. T he assumption in Keynes's theorythat produces a business cycle and the possibilityof long-continuing unemployment is that labormistakes its money wage for its real (purchasingpower) wage. It is not h uma n rationality, but the


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1985 Hu ma n N ature in Politics 97limits on that rationality and its breakdown, thataccounts for Keynes's important predictions.But the same thing can be said of the other,non-Keynesian, theories of the business cycle. (Imust except Milton Friedm an (1968), who essen-tially denies that there is such a phenomenon asreal unemployment.) For example, Lucas (1981),amo ng the m ost orthodo x of neoclassical econo-mists, attributes the business cycle to a differentlimit on hum an rationality. In his theory, it is notlabor but businessmen who behave irrationally.When general price changes occur (e.g., infla-tion), they mistake these changes for rel tivechanges affecting only prices in their own indus-try. It is this departure from objective rationalitythat produces the cycle in Lucas's model.

I have developed this example at some lengthbecause it is perhaps the most dramatic illustra-tion of a widespread phenomenon that is not wellunderstood outside the profession of economics,and perhaps not even within the profession: Alarge pa rt of the action of economic models-the strong conclusions they support-does notderive from the assumptions of objective rational-ity at all, but depends on auxiliary assumptionsthat are introduced to provide limits to thatrationality, assumptions about the process ofdecision.This being the case, one would suppose that agreat deal of attention would be devoted to theempirical validity or plausibility of the auxiliaryassumptions-in the examples just cited, theassumptions that labor or business, as the casemay be, suffers from a money illusion. However,this is not the way the practices and traditions ofeconomics have developed. Instead, there is atradi tion tha t is often referred to, w ithin econom-ics itself, as casual empiricism. Assum ptionsabout the shape of the utility function or thelimits on the rationality of economic actors are

commonly made in an armchair, o n the basis offeelings of p lausibility or reasonableness,and without systematic support from empiricalevidence. The assum ptions are never tested direct-ly, bu t only in the context of the models in whichthey are embedded. The goodness of fit of amodel, usually to aggregate data, is regarded asthe best justification for the assum ptions embed-ded in that model, whatever their ~ o u r c e . ~

#Friedm an's well-known methodological essay trans-forms these methodological practices into a stronglydefended doctrine. Friedm an argues tha t direct tests ofthe behavioral assumptions underlying an economicmodel are su perfluous a t best, an d positively misleading

Bounded Rationality Is Not IrrationalitySkepticism about substituting a priori postu-lates about rationality for factual knowledge of

human behavior should not be mistaken for aclaim that people are generally irrational. O nthe contrary, I think there is plenty of evidencethat people are generally quite rational; that is tosay, they usually have reasons for what they do.Even in m adness, there is almost always metho d,as Freud was at great pains to point o ut. A nd put-ting madness aside for a moment, almost allhuman behavior consists of sequences of goal-oriented actions.When, in spite of the evidence for this goal-oriented character of human behavior, we callsome of tha t behavior irrational, we may meanany one of several things. W e may deem behaviorirrational because, although it serves some par-ticular impulse, it is inconsistent with other goalsthat seem to us more important. W e may deem itirrational because the actor is proceeding on in-correct facts or ignoring whole areas of relevantfact. We may deem it irrational because the actorhas not drawn the correct conclusions from thefacts. We may deem it irrational because the actorhas failed to consider important alternativecourses of action. If the action involves thefuture, as most action does, we may deem itirrational because we don't think the actor usesthe best methods for forming expectations or f oradapting to uncertainty. All of these forms ofirrationality play import ant roles in the lives ofevery one of us, but I think it is misleading to callthem irrationality. They are better viewed asforms of bounded rationality.T o understand and predict h uma n behavior, wehave to deal with the realities of human rational-ity, that is, with bounded rationality. There isnothing obvious about these boundaries; there isno way to predict, a priori, just where they lie.

The Rationality Principle in PoliticsAfter this long excursion into the views ofhum an rationality that ar e commonly held in psy-chology and economics, let me come back now t othe subject of political science. What kind ofrationality does Homo politicus exhibit? Is he o rshe a creature of objective, substantive rational-ity; or instead, one of subjective, proceduralrationality? But am afraid that have already

tipped my hand and made it quite clear that Ibelieve the latter to be the case.If that is true, the rationality principle, as it isincorporated in theories of substantive rationality,will provide us with only limited help in under-


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The Am erican Politic a1 Science Reviewthe methods of economic reasoning to politicalbehavior, we must characterize th e political situa-tion, not as it appears objectively to theanalyst, but as it appears subjectively to theactors. We can only select the appropriate modelof adaptation a fter we undertake the requisite em-pirical study t o dete rmine this subjective represen-tation both of goals and of the situation or drawupon research in cognitive psychology to tell usabout the nature of that representation. A fewexamples drawn from the political science litera-ture will show what is involved.

An Example: Duverger s LawRecently, William Riker (1982) provided uswith an instructive account of a descriptive gener-alization that usually goes by the name ofDuverger's Law. In its roughest form, the lawasserts that plurality election rules bring aboutand maintain two-party, rather than multi-party,competition. In an informative way, Riker takesus through the history of the empirical researchthat has been done to test, t o confirm, refute, o ramend , this law. He also shows that political sci-entists have not been content simply to assert thelaw, or to test it empirically; they have also sought

to explain it. He saysFrom the first enunciation by Droop, the lawhas been implicitly embedded in a rationa l choicetheory about the behavior of politicians andvoters. This theory has been rendered mor e andmore explicit, especially in the last two decades,so that recent empirical work consciously in-vokes the r ational choice model. (1982, p. 766)

The so-called rational choice argument forDuverger's Law goes something like this. If anumber of candidates are running for office undera plurality election rule, a nd if candidates A and Bare well ahead of the pack so that it is unreason-able to suppo se that any othe r candidate will win,then it is rational t o limit your vote to your prefer-ence between A a nd B. The argument has t o beelaborated somewhat to account for two-partyconfigurations that are stable over time, but Ithink that I have conveyed the general idea.What assumptions does this argument makeabout you, the voter. First, it assumes that youhave a preference ranking among candidates andwish to vote so as to secure the election of a candi-date who is as high as possible on your ranking.Second, it assumes that you believe that one votemay decide the election (otherwise it is indifferent,in terms of the stated goal t o whom the vote goes).

considerable confidence in that assessment (e.g.,you do ot believe that one more vote could bringsuccess to any but one of the two candidatesjudged to have the most support). Fourth, itassumes that you do not attach a large value toproviding public evidence that your most pre-ferred candid ate has extensive, even if not plural-istic, public support.Since I have not tried to construct a formalaxiomization of this choice, perhaps there areother assumptions that must be made, in additionto those listed above. For the purposes of thepresent argument, however, my inventory ofassumptions will suffice. What the assumptionsshow is that only a small part of the work ofexplaining Duverger's Law is being done by thtrationality principle. Most of the work is beingdone by propositions that characterize the utilityfunction of the voter and his or her beliefs, expec-tations, an d calculations-that is to say, the limitsof rationality. These propositions are subject toempirical test.Perhaps th e key assumption here is the postu-late of sophisticated voting, that a ratio nalvoter believes his v ote shou ld be expended aspart of a selection process, not as an expression ofpreference (Downs, 1957, p. 48). But this postu -late is wholly independent of the usual definitionof objective rationality. There is no irrationalityin a utility function that regards a vote as an ex-pression of preference rather than an attempt toinfluence the selection. In fact, it is realistic tobelieve that one can express a preference (i.e.,change the numerical result of the vote, if only bya unit), but seldom realistic to believe that one canaffect the outcome of an election. Moreover, avoter might correctly (or incorrectly, but certainlynot irrationally) believe that expression of prefer-ence for a pa rty could increase the chances of thatparty's succeeding in subsequent elections.There are many more changes we can ring onthe possible beliefs of voters without impugningtheir (subjective) rationality. With these alterna-tive sets of beliefs are associated different votingbehaviors. It is not a t all hard to build a ration almodel of th e voter who stays home from th e pollsan d does not vote at all. H ence, we get very littleunderstanding or explanation of voting behaviorsimply from invoking th e principle of utility max-imization. T hat principle does not exempt us fromthe arduous task of testing all the auxiliary em-pirical assumptions about voters' values, beliefs,and expectations. And, as Riker shows us, whenwe subject an auxiliary assumptio n like the postu -late of sophisticated voting to empirical test, wediscover that the actual pattern of human re-sponse can be very complex indeed. We are then


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985 Hu ma n Nature in Politics 99dditional ExamplesIt should not be thought tha t Duverger's Law isan isolated case and that rational choice theories

derived from the assumption of utility maximiza-tion and unalloyed with auxiliary assumptionsabout preferences and beliefs have much morepredictive and explanatory power in most othercases. Recent issues of the merican PoliticalScience Review provide a rich mine of examplesthat supp ort o ur analysis of the respective roles ofreason and fact. One can stumble upon suchexamples by opening the pages almost at random ,and it appears to make little difference whetherthe author is a behavioralist or an economicrationalist by persuasion. (Or if there is a differ-ence, it is that the behavioralist makes fewer ex-plicit claims for rationality as the source of his orher conclusions than does the rational choicetheorist.)My next example is a study by Hibbs (1982) ofEconomic Outcomes and Political Support forBritish Governments among OccupationalClasses. Hib bs demon strates tha t various indi-cators of the health of the British economy arerelated to voting preferences. Score one for theobjective ration ality principle. Presu mably votersvote for the party that they think will enhancetheir economic well-being. But how d o we getfrom that general proposition to a prediction oftheir vote? We can make the leap only if we candiscover how voters judge which party will do th ebetter job of managing the economy. There aremany ways in which that judgment could bemade, none of them, probably, having highobjective validity.Hence, t he interesting an d significant finding ofHibbs's study is not that people employ a ration-ality principle. The interesting finding, which doesnot follow from such a principle, is that votersevaluate the cumulative performance of the gov-erning party relative to the prior performance ofthe current opposition, weighting current per-formance more heavily than past performance(p. 259).Now I don't know if Hibbs's model will holdup under further analysis or will apply equallywell to other times and places. However valid orinvalid the model, its powerful motor is not atheory of objectively rational choice but a veryspecific empirical assumption, based on notionsof bounded rationality, about how voters formtheir beliefs regarding the connections betweenthe economy and government. If Hibbs's model iscorrect, voters do this not by solving a m aximiza-tion problem but by setting an asp iration level (the

expect, but not what would be predicted by atheory of utility maximization.A third example has to d o with the applicationof rationality principles to a game resembling theprisoners' dilemma, bu t allowing the players theadditional alternative of exiting from the situation(Orbell, Schwartz-Shea, Simm ons, 1984). Intheir abstract, the auth ors, using the usual distinc-tion between defectors and cooperators in theprisoners' dilemma, sum up the matter very well:

We derive the prediction that the exit optionwill drain the community or gro up more of coop-erators than of defectors.But experimental da ta do not suppo rt this pre-diction; cooperators d o not leave more frequent-ly than defectors. [We] present d ata su pport-ing the hypothesis that cooperators often staywhen their personal interest is with exitingbecause of the same ethical or group-regardingimpulse that (presumably) led them t o cooperatein the first place.

In this experiment, again, the principle oobjective rationality contributes little to predict-ing or explaining the findings. Everything rests,instead, on the assumptions that are made abo utthe utility functions of two classes of players,those who are prepared to cooperate with theother players and those who are prepared tobetray them. What is more, to explain thebehavior of the cooperators, a strong componentof altruism must be introduced into their utilityfunction^.^Oth er research within a game-theoretical frame-work shares many of the characteristics of thisstudy. T he predicted outcome depends sensitivelyupon assumptions not derivable from the prin-ciple of objective rationality, about participants'beliefs an d values. For example, in a study involv-ing the conditions under which subjects wouldcontribute to the provision of public goods, theauthors summarize their findings thus (van deKragt, Orbell, Dawes, 1983, p. 112):

We present hypotheses about why designatinga minimal contributing set works. Th e essen-tial property of the minimal contributing set . is criticalness the contributions of the membersof the minimal contributing set are each criticalto obtaining the public good the members desire,and they know it. It is reasonable (albeit not adom inant strategy) to contribute because reason-able behavior can be expected from other mini-mal contributing set members who are in thesame situation.


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Hu ma n Nature in PoliticsWe sometimes, perhaps, experience a mildmalaise in that our research does not seem to betaking us in the d irection of a few sweeping gener-alizations that encompass the whole of political

behavior. A hop e of finding ou r three laws ofmotion'' was probably a ma jor part of the appealof rational choice theory in its purer forms. But amore careful look at the natural sciences wouldshow us that they, too, get only a little mileagefrom their general laws. Those laws have to befleshed out by a myriad of facts, all of which mustbe harvested by labor ious empirical research. Per -haps our aspirations for lawfulness should bemodeled upon the complexities of molecular biol-ogy-surely a successful science, bu t hardly a neatone-rather tha n upon the simplicities of classicalmechanics. Radical Irrationality

Thus far, I have dealt with the picture of pro-cedural rationality that emerges from moderncognitive psychology and the relation betweenthat picture and the economist's notion of sub-stantive rationality. My main conclusion is thatthe key premises in any theory tha t pu rpor ts to ex-plain the real phenomena of politics are the em-pirical assumptions about goals and, even moreimportant, about the ways in which people char-acterize the choice situations that face them.These goals an d characterizations do not rest onimmutable first principles, but are functions oftime and place that can only be ascertained by em -pirical inquiry. In this sense, political science isnecessarily a historical science, in the same wayand for the same reason that astronomy is. Whatwill happen next is not independent of where thesystem is right now . A nd a description of w here itis right now m ust include a description of the sub-jective view of the situation that informs thechoices of the actors.But you may feel that I have not gone farenough in my skepticism about reason in politicalbehavior. Surely even the concept of boundedrationality doe s no t captu re the whole role of pas-sion and unreason in human affairs. Don't weneed t o listen to Lasswell and Freud as well as t oWallas and James?Assuredly we do. From the earliest times it hasbeen seen that human behavior is not always theresult of deliberate calculation, even of a bound-edly rational kind. Sometimes it must be attrib-uted to passion, to the capture of the decisionprocess by powerful impulses that do not permitthe mediation of thoug ht. Th e criminal law takesexplicit account of passion in assigning differentpenalties to deliberate and impulsive acts.

to the actor, that provide the real wellspringsof action. T his approac h, whether it be correct orfalse, h as always been troublesome fo r empiricalresearch, because it makes suspect human testi-mony about motives.1 If we don't know why weact, if ou r motives are unconscious, then we can'treport them, no matter how much we wish tocooperate with the researcher.Let me take a more conservative approach,which accords well with what we know about themechanisms that link emo tions to reason (Simon,1978, chap. 1.3 . People are endowed with verylarge long-term memories, but with very narrowcapacities fo r simultaneous atten tion t o d ifferentpieces of inform ation. A t any given momen t, onlya little information, drawn from the senses andfrom long-term mem ory, can be held in the focusof attention. This information is not static; it iscontinuously being processed and transformed,with one item being replaced by another as newaspects of a stimulus are sensed, new inferencesdrawn, or new bits of inform ation retrieved fromlong-term m emory. Nevertheless, of all the thingswe know, o r can see or hear a roun d us, only a tinyfraction influences our behavior over any shortinterval of time.If a particular strong drive takes control of ou rattention, determining not only our goals of themoment but also selecting out the sensory andmem ory facts that we will consider, then behaviorcan be determined by that drive or passion as longas its control persists. But passionate behavior inthis extreme form is exceptional and no t com monin hum an behavior. Th e control process is usuallymore complex.Even in the case of a person like Hitler, whosebehavior might be interpreted by some cliniciansas a pure instance of an all-consuming hatred orself-hatred, a large cognitive element intrudes intothe behavior. Hitler was not just angry; hedirected his hatred toward a particular group ofpeople, Jews, and he made decisions that werearguably rational on the premise that the Jewishpeople were to be extirpated to satisfy that hatred.For some purposes of political analysis, it may beenough to postulate the overtly expressed valuesand goals without seeking their deeper roots in th eunconscious, or a t least without trying to explainhow they arrived there.Th e methodological lesson I would draw is tha twe need to understand passion and to provide for

T o r a review of some reasons why we should suspecttestimony a bou t motives, see Nisbett and W ilson (1977).The authors of that study draw conclusions that arerathe r too broad for their evidence, but their main point


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3 2 The Am erican Political Science Review Vol. 9it in ou r political models, b ut we need particularlyto provide in those models for th e limited span ofattention tha t governs what considerations, out ofa whole host of possible ones, will actually influ-ence the deliberations that precede action. In par-ticular, we need to understand the conditions thatpredispose hum an beings to impulsive action th atdisregards much of the potentially relevant reality.I would like to comm ent on three aspects of thisquestion: the nature of the attention mechanism,the role of uncertainty, an d' th e process wherebynovel ways of viewing situations are evoked orgenerated.Attention

The human eye and ear are highly paralleldevices, capable of extracting many pieces of in-formation simultaneously from the environmentand decoding them into their significant features.Before this information can be used by the delib-erative mind, however, it must proceed throughthe bottleneck of attention-a serial, no t parallel,process whose information capacity is exceedinglysmall. Psychologists usually call this bottleneckshort-term memory, and measurements show reli-ably that it can hold only ab out six chunks (that isto say, six familiar items) of information.Th e details of short-term memory and the bo t-tleneck of attention are not important for ourpurposes. W hat is importan t is tha t only one or avery few things can be attended t o simultaneously.The limits can be broadened a bit, but onlymodestly, by "time-sharing9'-switching atten-tion periodically. The narrowness of the span ofattention accounts for a great deal of humanunreason that considers only one facet of a multi-faceted matter before a decision is reached.For example, it has been hypothesized that theart of campaign oratory is much more an art of

directing a ttention (to th e issues on w hich the can-didate believes himself or herself to have thebroadest support) than an art of persuading peo-ple to change their minds on issues." Similarly,shifts in expressed voting intentions during thecourse of an election campaign have been ex-plained as caused by evocation of beliefs an d atti-tudes already latent in voters' minds (e.g., partyloyalties) (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948, chap. 9).Another example, highly characteristic of thepolitical process, was the shift of attention fromenvironmental problems to problems of energysupply that took place immediately after the OilShock, and that greatly altered public prioritiesfor a num ber of years.

The unreason associated with attention focus-ing has no necessary connection with passion-cold reasoning can be as narrow and one-sided ashot reasoning. But the existence of these narrowlimits on the span of human attention is a prin-cipal reason why we mus t distinguish between the"real" situation and the situation as perceived bythe political actors when we try to apply therationality principle to make predictions ofbehavior. People are, a t best, rational in terms ofwhat they are aware of , an d they can be aware ofonly tiny, disjointed facets of reality.Uncertainty

Lack o f reliable knowledge an d information is amajor factor in almost all real-life decision mak-ing. In o ur sobe rer moments, we realize how littlewe know and can predict about the decision-making p remises an d processes of the rulers of theUSSR. Yet the content of a rational foreign policyis highly sensitive to our hypotheses about thesematters. The effects of the policies of the presi-dent upon the well-being of the American econ-omy ar e only slightly less uncertain. A t least thereis often little consensus in the economics profes-sion about these effects.Wherever such uncertainties are present, a n en-hanced o pportu nity is provided for unconscious,or only partly conscious, drives and wishes to in-fluence deliberation. Where the facts are clear (tothe acto rs as well as to us), we have some chance,by application of the principles of reason, to cal-culate what the choice will be. Where evidence isweak and conflicting, a rationality principle haslittle independent predictive power.Evocation

Finally, to understand political choices, weneed to un derstand where the fram e of referencefo r the actors' think ing comes from-how it isevoked. An impo rtant component of the frame ofreference is the set of alternatives that are givenconsideration in the choice process. We need tounderstand not only how people reason aboutalternatives, b ut where the alternatives come fromin the first place. The process whereby alternativesare generated has been somewhat ignored as anobject of research.But not wholly ignored Turn ing again to myfavorite source of information on the s tate of theprofession, I find in a recent issue of The American Political Science Review anoth er imaginativepaper by William Riker, in fact h is 1983 Presiden-tial Address to the Association, on precisely thisissue. (I could wish that he had not invented the


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Hum an Nature in Politicsposals in the Constitutional Convention for elect-ing the President, with particular concern for thegeneration of new alternatives, and for the shiftsin attention and emphasis on issues that accom-panied their introduction.

Riker speaks of these matters in terms of artis-try within the rational choice context. I thin kthat the generation of alternatives is much morethan that: that it is an integral component of anyveridical account of human decision making, orof human bounded rationality generally. Thetheory of the generation of alternatives deserves,an d requires, a trea tment tha t is just as definitiveand thorough as the treatment we give to thetheory of choice amo ng prespecified alternatives.But is such a treatment possible? Are we nottreading upon the sacred precincts of creativity?Indeed we are; but I think the precincts are nolonger sacrosanct. Th e same cognitive psychologythat has been elaborating the theory of humanbounded rationality has made considerable prog-ress toward constructing models of the processesof discovery and creativity that can account forthese processes in terms q uite ak in t o those i t usesto account fo r ordinary problem solving. Again, Ican not tell that story here but m ust limit myself t opointers to the literature (Bradshaw, Langley,Simon, 1983; Lenat, 1983 .

ConclusionIn this essay I have tried to provide a n overview-a very general one-of ou r current knowledgeof human nature in politics. I first undertook tocompare the two principal theories of humanrationality tha t have found application in politicalresearch: the procedural bounded rationalitytheory that has its origins in contemporary cog-nitive psychology, and the substantive globalrationality theory that has been nurtured chieflyin economics. Then , by means of a series of exam-

ples, I examined the relative roles played byrationality principles an d by th e auxiliary assump-tions that accompany them, respectively, in pre-dicting an d explaining hum an behavior in politicalcontexts. Finally, I commented on the more ex-treme deviations from the objective rationalitymodel tha t exhibit themselves in political affairs,an d showed how they could be explained, in con-siderable measure, in terms of the m echanisms ofattention and the severe limits that the architec-ture of the mind places on the span of humanattention.My overview, if it is even partly valid, carries anumber of implications for research in politicalscience. First, it dissipates the illusion, if anyoneholds it, that an application of principles of ra-

pirical research a t both macro a nd micro levels. Itis far easier (for the political scientist and fo r thepolitical actor) to calculate the rational responseto a fully specified situation than it is to arrive at areasonable specification of the situation. Andthere is no way, without empirical study, to pre-dict which of innumerable reasonable specifica-tions the actors will adopt.Second, my overview suggests that the study ofthe mechanisms of attention directing, situationdefining, and evoking are among the most prom-ising targets of political research. In particular,the qu estion of where political ideas come from isnot only highly deserving of study, b ut also withinthe competence of our contemporary researchtechniques. I join Bill Riker in commending it toyou as one of the truly exciting and significantareas of investigation in our field.Nothing is more fundamental in setting ourresearch agenda and informing our researchmethods than our view of the nature of th e humanbeings whose behavior we are studying. I t makes adifference, a very large difference, t o ou r researchstrategy whether we are studying the nearlyomniscient H om o economicus of rational choicetheory or t he boundedly rational Hornopsycholo-gicus of cognitive psychology. It makes a differ-ence to research, bu t it also makes a difference fo rthe proper design of political institutions. JamesMadison12 was well aware of th at, an d in th epages of the Federalist Papers he opted for thisview of the human condition (Federalist, No. 55):

As there is a degree of depravity in mankindwhich requires a cer tain degree of circumspectionand distrust, so there are other qualities inhuman nature which justify a certain portion ofesteem a nd confidence.-a balanced an d realistic view, we may concede,of bounded hum an rationality an d its accompany-ing frailties of motive and reason.

ReferencesAnderson, J The architecture of cognition. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.Bradshaw, G. F. Langley, P. W., Simon, H. A.Studying scientific discovery by computer simula-tion. Science 1983, 222 (Dec. 2 , 971-975.Carbonell, J G. Subjective understanding: Computer

Or was it Ham ilton? M osteller and Wallace (1964)attribut e No. 55 of The Federalist to Madison, but it isthe least certain of their attributions of the numberswhose authorship has been disputed. Since the senti-ment quoted here is certainly consistent with the beliefs


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Th e American Politic a1 Science Review Vol. 79models of belief systems. New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Dept. of Computer Science, 1979.Crecine, J P. Governmental problem solving: A com-puter simulation of municipal budgeting. Chicago:Rand McNally, 1969.

Downs, A. An economic theory of democracy. NewYork: Harp er Row, 1957.Eastman, D. Political science. In D. L. Sills (Ed.).International encyclopedia of the social sciences(vol. 12). New York: M acmilla n, 1968 , pp . 282-298.Ericsson, K., Simon, H . A Protocolanalysis: Verbalreports as data. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1984.Friedman, M. The m ethodology of positive economics.In Essays in positive economics. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1953.Friedman, M. The role of monetary policy. AmericanEconomic Review, 1968, 58 1-17.Gerwin, B. Budgeting public funds: The decision proc-ess in an urban school district. Madison: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1969.Hibbs, D. A., Jr. Economic outcomes and politicalsupport for British governments among occupa-tional classes: A dynamic analysis. American Politi-cal Science Review, 1982, 76 259-279.Kahn eman , D., Slovic, P. , Tversky, A. (Eds.). Judg-ment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1982.Keynes, J. M. The general theory of employment,interest and money. London: Macmillan, 1936.van de Kragt, A. J C., Orbell, J M., Dawes, R. M.Th e minimal contributing set as a solution to publicgoods problems. American Political Science Review,1983, 77 112-122.Lasswell, H. Psychopathology and politics. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1934.Lasswell, H. World politics and personal insecurity.New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935.Lazarsfeld, P. S., Berelson, B., Gau det, H Thepeople s choice(2nd ed.). New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1948.Lenat, D. B. EURISKO. A program that learns newheuristics and domain concepts. Artjficial Intelli-gence, 1983, 21 61-98.Lippmann, W. Public opinion. New York: Macmillan

(1 922/1944).Lucas, R. E., Jr. Studies in business cycle theory. Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981.Lucas, R. E., Jr., Sargent, T. J. (Eds.). Rationalexpectation and economic practice. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

Mosteller, F., Wallace, D. W. Influence and dis-puted authorship: The Federalist. Reading, Mass.:Addison-Wesley, 1964.Newell, A., Simon, H. A. Human problem solving.Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972.Nisbett, R. E., Wilson, T. D. Telling more th an weknow: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psycho-logical Review, 1977, 84 231-259.Orbell, J. M., Schwartz-Shea, P., Simmons, R. T. Docooperators exit more readily than defectors. Ameri-can Political Science Review, 1984, 76 753-766.Riker, W. H. The heresthetics of constitution-making.The presidency in 1787, with comments on deter-minism and rational choice. American Political Sci-ence Review, 1984, 78 1-16.Riker, W. H. The two-party system and Duverger'sLaw: An essay on the history of political science.American Political Science Review, 1982, 76753-766.Savage, L. J. The foundation of statistics. New York:Wiley, 1954.Simon, H. A Administrative behavior. New York:Free Press, 1947/1976. (a)Simon, H. A. A behavioral model of rational choice.Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1955, 69 99-1 18.Reprinted in H. A. Simon. Models of bounded ra-tionality (vol. 2, chap. 7.2). Cambridge, Mass.: M ITPress, 1982.Simon, H A. F rom substantive to procedural rational-ity. In S. J. Latsis (Ed.). Method and appraisal inEconomics. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1976, pp. 129-148. (b)Simon, H. A Models of bounded rationality. Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982.Simon, H. A. Models of thought. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1979.Simon; H. A. Motivational and emotional controls ofcognition. In Models of thought. New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979, chap. 1.3.Simon, H. A. On the behavioral and rational founda-tion of economic dynamics. Journal of EconomicBehavior and Organization, 1984, 5 35-55.Simon, H. A. Reason in human affairs. Stanford,Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983.Wallas, G. Human nature in politics (4th ed.).

Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1906/1944.Weatherford, M . S. Economic voting and the sym-bolic politics argument: A reinterpretation andsynthesis. American Political Science Review, 1983,77 158-174.


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You have printed the following article:

Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science

Herbert A. Simon


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[Footnotes]

9 Studying Scientific Discovery by Computer Simulation

Gary F. Bradshaw; Patrick W. Langley; Herbert A. Simon

Science, New Series, Vol. 222, No. 4627. (Dec. 2, 1983), pp. 971-975.

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References

Studying Scientific Discovery by Computer Simulation

Gary F. Bradshaw; Patrick W. Langley; Herbert A. Simon

Science, New Series, Vol. 222, No. 4627. (Dec. 2, 1983), pp. 971-975.

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The Role of Monetary Policy

Milton Friedman

The American Economic Review, Vol. 58, No. 1. (Mar., 1968), pp. 1-17.

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Economic Outcomes and Political Support for British Governments among OccupationalClasses: A Dynamic Analysis

Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr.; Nicholas Vasilatos


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The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods ProblemsAlphons J. C. van de Kragt; John M. Orbell; Robyn M. Dawes

The American Political Science Review, Vol. 77, No. 1. (Mar., 1983), pp. 112-122.

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Do Cooperators Exit More Readily than Defectors?

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The Heresthetics of Constitution-Making: The Presidency in 1787, with Comments onDeterminism and Rational Choice

William H. Riker


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The Two-Party System and Duverger's Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science

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A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice

Herbert A. Simon

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 69, No. 1. (Feb., 1955), pp. 99-118.

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Economic Voting and the "Symbolic Politics" Argument: A Reinterpretation and Synthesis

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Simon (1985) Human Nature in Politics

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