In cognitive science, ir/rationality about human intelligence has been discussed for a long time. In this paper, we focused on simple heuristics that humans use and reviewed the historical background of the rationality of heuristics in order to understand several perspectives on rationality. Historically, the rationality of heuristics has been discussed mainly based on satisficing (Simon’s bounded rationality), deviations from logical principals (Tversky and Kahneman’s heuristic and bias program), matching between heuristics and environmental structures (Gigerenzer’s ecological rationality), and optimal allocations of cognitive resources (Lieder and Griffiths’s resource rationality). Finally, we discuss possible directions for future research on the rationality of heuristics.