ABSTRACT
This chapter has its beginnings in Harold Guetzkow’s living room, sometime in the fall of 1960. I was a first-year graduate student in psychology doing library research for HG on a project that was to become A Social Psychology of Group Processes for Decision Making (Collins and Guetzkow 1964), but the room was full of international relations people partying and talking shop. March and Simon’s (1958) Organizations , on which HG was a collaborator, was then a vivid presence at Northwestern. The debate pervasive throughout the party was “Does an analysis of organization dynamics provide insight into decision-making at the national level?” As I had spent the better part of the preceding day heatedly arguing with psychologists about the relevance of animal learning to human behavior, I was struck with one of those profound insights which are an occupational hazard of first-year graduate students: “Oh,” I marveled; “The process of the rat-to-human and organization-to-nation arguments is the same: is there profit in interdisciplinary extrapolation?” (Or for that matter, is there profit in simulation-to-“real life” extrapolation?)
