ABSTRACT
In the 1950s and 1960s, economists such as Herbert Simon and psychologists such as George Katona had introduced the concepts of bounded rationality and heuristics, and had tried to reconcile psychology and economics. The foundation of modern behavioral economics can be traced back to those years. The conditions were therefore ripe for Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s heuristics and biases research program. While economics and psychology were becoming reacquainted, psychology itself was transforming. Since the 1950s, behaviorism had dominated the field. In the 1950s, several disciplines joined together to redefine psychological research. Psychologists could explore hidden mental processes, using methods and models from other fields such as computer science, philosophy, and neuroscience. The American psychologist Herbert Simon was one of the first researchers to compare the human brain to a computer, introducing concepts of rules and heuristics.
