---
title: "Resource-rational analysis (Lieder & Griffiths 2020) self-describes as a direct extension of Anderson's rational analysis, pushing it toward Marr's algorithmic level"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the primary (Lieder & Griffiths 2020, BBS 43 e1 target article) was read directly via extract_pdf at capture time and the quote taken from that read; the queen's independent re-check is blocked by this run's tooling (WebFetch summarizes rather than returning byte-exact text, no PDF extractor available), so the verbatim quote is capture-verified, not queen-reverified"
source_url: "https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/lieder_resource.pdf"
source_author: "Falk Lieder and Thomas L. Griffiths"
source_date: "2020-01-18T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Resource-rational analysis can be seen as an extension of rational-analysis from predicting behavior from the structure of the external environment to predicting cognitive mechanisms from internal cognitive resources and the external environment."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-20-is-resource-rational-analysis-lieder-griffiths-the-tightest.md, 2026-07-27"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-20-is-resource-rational-analysis-lieder-griffiths-the-tightest.md"
date_created: "2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["resource-rationality","rational-analysis","anderson","lieder-griffiths","marr-levels","bounded-optimality","cognitive-science","optimization"]
audits: ["2026-07-28 claude-opus-4-8"]
---


In their *Behavioral and Brain Sciences* target article, Falk Lieder and
Thomas L. Griffiths state their project's genealogy in their own words:
"Resource-rational analysis can be seen as an extension of rational-analysis
from predicting behavior from the structure of the external environment to
predicting cognitive mechanisms from internal cognitive resources and the
external environment." The relationship is not incidental framing — it is
built out structurally. Anderson's rational analysis
([[claim-rational-analysis-anderson-optimal-solution-marr-level]], Anderson
1990, *The Adaptive Character of Thought*) is given as a six-step method (Box 1:
specify goals, model the environment, assume minimal computational limits,
derive optimal behavior, test against data, iterate). [[entity-resource-rational-analysis|Resource-rational
analysis]] is presented as a parallel five-step method (Box 2) that keeps
Anderson's computational-level starting point but adds three things Anderson's
program deliberately omitted: an explicit class of feasible algorithms, the
resource costs those algorithms incur, and a derivation of the algorithm that
optimally trades resource cost against approximation accuracy.

The authors describe the move as "pushing the principles of rational analysis
toward [[entity-david-marr|Marr]]'s algorithmic level" — the same
computational/algorithmic distinction already load-bearing in the vault's
Anderson note. Where classical rational analysis assumes an essentially
unbounded optimizer and reads behaviour off the environment's structure alone,
resource-rational analysis makes the optimizer's own limits part of what is
being optimized.

This confirms one of the two legs the vault's
[[claim-optimization-as-theory-of-mind-two-lineages|optimization-as-theory-of-mind]]
bridge was probing: the Anderson side of that bridge holds, explicitly and
quotably. The Werbos side does not
([[claim-resource-rational-analysis-descends-from-bounded-optimality-not-werbos-adp]]),
and the combined verdict is worked out in
[[observation-resource-rational-analysis-confirms-anderson-leg-not-werbos-leg]].