Introduction
In all areas of public policy (or social policy), the word „rationality“ is often used today, as in the rationality of measures. Such rationality is expected to be expressed not only in economic terms but also in substance, e.g., by the absence of unintended side effects of proposed measures. But what is the real state of our ability to rationally plan interventions into social reality? Is our knowledge of the world rather partial and our resulting decision-making therefore rather „boundedly rational“? This text attempts a short theoretical analysis of the word „rationality“ from the perspective of two important authors in the fields of decision theory, organization theory and public policy theory, that is, the theory of intervention into social reality: Herbert A. Simon and Charles Lindblom.
Herbert A. Simon’s Theory of “Bounded Rationality”
Herbert A. Simon’s theory of “bounded” or “limited” rationality (1961) points out that knowledge in the decision-making process determines which consequences will follow from certain alternatives. It is the task of our knowledge to select from the whole set of possible consequences a smaller subset, or even (in the ideal case) one configuration of consequences.
A particular subject (actor) cannot know the exact consequences that will follow his or her behavior. This issue can be called the theory of bounded (limited) rationality. What an actor can do, however, is to shape expectations of future consequences. These expectations are based on known empirical relationships and information about the existing situation. Knowledge is therefore „a means for discovering what consequences behavior will actually produce in reality.“(1) The main purpose of knowledge, even though it is only one part of the choice process, is to reveal the specific unique options that are the consequences of each alternative behavior, although in practice this purpose is achieved only imperfectly. „Knowledge of the consequences of behavior was therefore identified by Simon as the primary variable influencing the choice of action. A second influence was found in individuals’ preferences for certain configurations of consequences in comparison with others.“(2)
So let us look more closely at the paradigm of bounded rationality, sometimes also called the „administrative model.“ Simon essentially proposes that human imperfection and boundedness are natural and must be taken into account. According to Simon, the social sciences suffer from a case of acute schizophrenia in their treatment of rationality. At one extreme we have economists who attribute to the economic man (homo economicus) absurdly omniscient rationality. The economic man has a complete and consistent system of preferences that allow him „always to choose from alternatives that are open to him; always to be fully aware of what these alternatives are; to face no computational complexity limits when trying to determine which alternatives are best; probability calculations are neither „frightening“ nor „mysterious“ to him.“(3)
At the other extreme, Simon says, we find tendencies in social psychology that try to reduce all knowledge to impression. Therefore, it is often cited as an example that a coin appears larger to poor children than to rich ones (Bruner and Postman), that the pressure of a social group can make a person see a dot where there is none (Asch), and so on. A number of behavioral scientists were busy pointing out that people are not as rational as they think they are. It is likely that the next generation will show us that they are far more rational than we describe them today—but with less grandiose rationality than what is proclaimed by economists, as Simon notes.
A further complication in decision-making appears when more than one individual is included in the process. In such a case, decisions of other individuals will be included in the conditions each individual must deal with when choosing his or her own decision. That is, each „individual must (in order to determine specifically the consequences of his actions) know what others will do. This is a factor of crucial importance for the whole administrative decision-making process.“(4) Here there is indeed a certain circularity. Before A can rationally choose his strategy, he must know which strategy B selected; and before B chooses his strategy, he must know what A selected.
Simon’s definition of rationality and its limits
Probably the only way to avoid ambiguities (or to clarify these ambiguities) is to use the term „rational“ with a suitable qualifier. Then, according to Simon, a decision can be called “objectively” rational if it is truly the correct behavior for maximizing given values in a given situation. It is “subjectively” rational when it maximizes goal attainment relative to the actor’s current knowledge. It is “deliberately” rational to the extent that adaptation toward the goal is a conscious process. It is “reflectively” rational to the extent that adaptation toward the goal is reflectively caused (by the individual or by the organization). „A decision is „organizationally“ rational if it is oriented to organizational goals; it is „personally“ rational if it is oriented to individual goals.“(5)
According to Simon, the pattern of human choice is often more a response to a stimulus than a choice between alternatives. Effective administration, according to Simon, requires rational decision-making; decisions are rational when subjects choose the best alternative to achieve the goal. But administrative decisions are highly complex, and rationality is limited for various reasons: „all consequences that flow from a given direction of activity cannot be predicted; consequences of activities lie in the future and therefore are difficult to evaluate realistically; and rationality requires choice among all possible alternatives, but many of them never occur to us and therefore are not taken into account.“(6)
Accordingly, Simon says, current behavior of a subject does not satisfy objective rationality in three main ways in terms of the definition above: 1) „Rationality requires full knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow each choice. In reality, knowledge of consequences is always only fragmentary. 2) Because these consequences lie in the future, imagination must replace the lack of experience in assigning values. Values can be anticipated only partially. 3) Rationality requires choice among all possible behavioral alternatives. In real behavior, however, very few of these possible alternatives „come to mind.“(7)
_ad 1): Incompleteness of knowledge_Rationality implies complete and unreachable knowledge of the exact consequences of each choice. In reality, a human being can never know more than fragmentary knowledge of the conditions surrounding his or her action and cannot have more than limited insight into the regulations and laws that may allow future consequences to be inferred from knowledge of current circumstances.
_ad 2): Difficulties in anticipation_It is common experience that anticipated desire can be very different from reality as later realized. This is not only a consequence of failure in anticipating consequences. One reason is that the mind cannot grasp consequences in their entirety at one moment. Instead, attention shifts from one value to another, with resulting shifts in preferences.
_ad 3): Scope of possible behavioral alternatives_Of all possible behavioral alternatives, only a very small number comes to mind (at a given moment) as a genuinely possible alternative behavior. Since each alternative has different consequences, it happens that many possible consequences never occur, because it is not recognized in advance that they are possible consequences of available behavioral alternatives.
We can see the limits of rationality here as the inability of human thinking to take into account all aspects of a given decision—that is, value, knowledge and behavior—that could be relevant. The same points in expanded form are shown in the table below.
Assumptions of the theory of bounded rationality| | | --- | | Assumptions about decision-making according to Simon’s theory of bounded rationality | | A) human knowledge is incomplete and fragmented | | B) a person cannot weigh many consequences of his actions | | C) a person cannot think about too many things at once (attention limit) | | D) a person cannot remember everything (memory limit) | | E) a person acts on the basis of routine, habit and conservatism | | F) a person lives in a constraining organizational environment |
_Source: Veselý 1997:70_Briefly put, individuals are not capable of making complex decisions rationally. Blau and Scott thus see systematic organization of “individuals” as the only way to avoid too broad a scale of necessary decision-making for each member. “The function of organization is therefore to limit the scope of decisions that each member must perform; only in this way can one approach this problem rationally.“(8)
Charles Lindblom’s Incremental Rationality
In Charles Lindblom’s understanding, this is a different type of rationality from how the word rationality is commonly understood. It is “everyday” rationality, and a form of such rationality can be a so-called incremental approach, which Charles Lindblom develops (1959). The author proceeds from methodological individualism; social and political life is pictured as a pluralistic game of interests of personalities, which, however, is realized in mutual interactions and action is also dependent on the social context in which it takes place.
A discussion of the so-called incremental (incremental) way of making and implementing policy can be traced, according to Colebatch, already to Lindblom’s 1959 article, in which he „…criticized the view of decision-making as a complex search for an optimal route to achieve known results, while pointing out that in practice means and results are inseparable, analysis is rather limited than complete, policy emerges rather through small successive steps than one firm decision—and the sign of a good decision is not so much attainment of the given goals as people’s agreement with the way those goals were attained.“(9)
One can therefore infer that the process of introducing new policies will continue even after adoption of the policy we are observing and will continue to influence its implementation. From these assumptions follows the so-called incremental model of policy-making, which emphasizes gradual, small, marginal changes in the policy-making process. „It forces actors to perceive ‚problems‘ as subject to ongoing ‚redefinition‘ according to available resources for solving them.“(10)
What is interesting about this model, first of all, is that according to Lindblom this is just as rational and systematic as the method based on clearly defined goals. This way of making policy acquired a somewhat disparaging name, „muddling through,“ that is, „getting by somehow“ or a „discontinuous stacking of decisions“ (disjointed incrementalism). Lindblom therefore proposed his own alternative to the rationalist analysis of decision-making in the political sphere.
According to Winkler, „the incremental model of political decision-making presents a specific conception of political rationality. It is a rationality that ties individual decision-making to the socio-political context of the individual and to the concrete situation in which the decision is made. His conception of practical, everyday policy-making does not begin from some ideal, precisely formulated goal, but in the concrete political situations that exist and act upon decision-making actors.“(11)
From this „everyday“ policy-making follows the logical consequence of only small, gradual, marginal changes and their gradual accumulation on one another (hence incrementalism). „If we summarize the issue, the consequence of the discussion on incrementalism has resulted in at least two distinct analytic shifts: (1) a shift from desired policy outcomes to the process in which policy is carried out and (2) a shift from the logic of the system as a whole to the logic of participants.“(12)
Lindblom’s incrementalism further evokes the so-called garbage can model. The authors of the model, Cohen, March and Olsen, argued that „institutions do not function in such a way that they find solutions when a problem emerges. On the contrary, they claim, members of an institution have a whole range of ideas that usually end up in the garbage can. ‚Only when a problem appears do all start rummaging through the mental garbage can and looking for a solution among ideas that appeared in the past and were not used.‘(13)
Conclusion
The purpose of this text was to point to the limits of our ability to rationally decide about intervention in social reality. Herbert A. Simon, as well as Charles Lindblom, likewise point out that our knowledge of society is partial and incomplete, and our decision-making is subordinate to this fact. The message of this text should be a warning against excessive hubris on the part of us humans, and especially those who work in the field of planning and designing intervention into society (e.g., for the purpose of solving problems of marginalization or social exclusion), namely people responsible for making public and social policy. Along this theoretical line, I call for a certain humility in matters of intervening in social reality. Let us together keep in mind, for example with Anthony Giddens, that contemporary society is dealing with more problems than it did with natural problems that dominated earlier, and that modern society, over roughly two hundred years of its existence, has brought upon itself more of these issues. It is possible—perhaps more likely—that many of these problems were brought upon ourselves by our own excessive self-assurance regarding our ability to „rationally“ decide in the making of public or social policy.
Author: Martin Smutek
Used literature:
- BLAU, P. M.; SCOTT, R. W. Formal Organizations. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1962.
- COLEBATCH, H. K. Úvod do policy. Brno: Barrister and Principal, 2005.
- GIDDENS, A. Unikající svět. Praha: SLON, 2000.
- KRATOCHVÍL, P. Teorie evropské integrace. Praha: Portál, 2008.
- LACA, S.: Intolerancia sociálno-patologických javov v postmodernej spoločnosti, In: Inkluze versus exkluze – dilema sociálni patologie, Brno, Institut mezioborových studií, 2010.
- SIMON, H. A. Administrative Behavior. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961.
- VESELÝ, A. Jak si vybrat „svoji“ teorii rozhodování. In Purkrábek, M. (ed.). Rozhodování, financování a komunikace ve veřejné politice v České republice. Praha: Univerzita Karlova, 1997.
- WINKLER, J. Implementace – Institucionální hledisko analýzy veřejných programů. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2002.
_____(1) LACA, S.: Intolerancia sociálno-patologických javov v postmodernej spoločnosti, In: Inkluze versus exkluze – dilema sociálni patologie, Brno: Institut mezioborových studií, 2010, s. 67. (2) SIMON, H. A.: Administrative Behavior. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961. p. 77. (3) Tamtiež p. 75. (4) Tamtiež p. 70–71. (5) Tamtiež p. 76. (6) BLAU, P. M.; SCOTT, R. W. Formal Organizations. San Francisco: The Macmillan Company, 1962, p. 36–37. (7) SIMON, H. A.: Administrative Behavior. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961. p. 81. (8) BLAU, P. M.; SCOTT, R. W. Formal Organizations. San Francisco : Chandler Publishing Company, 1962, p. 36. (9) COLEBATCH, H. K.: Úvod do policy. Brno: Barrister and Principal, 2005, p. 74. (10) WINKLER, J. Implementace – Institucionální hledisko analýzy veřejných programů. Brno : Masarykova univerzita, 2002, p. 57. (11) Tamže p. 111. (12) COLEBATCH, H. K.: Úvod do policy. Brno: Barrister and Principal, 2005, p. 75. (13) KRATOCHVÍL, P. Teorie evropské integrace. Praha : Portál, 2008, p. 132. ________The contribution was presented at the 5th annual scientific conference with international participation titled „Sociálno-patologické javy a marginalizované skupiny“, organized by Ústav Kráľovnej Pokoja z Medžugorja Bardejov, Institut mezioborových studii Brno, Filozofická fakulta UPJS Košice, and held on October 8, 2010 in Bardejov._
