Perceptual Rationality: An Evolutionary Game Theory of Perceptually Rational Decision-Making

TL;DR

This paper introduces a perceptual rationality framework within evolutionary game theory, explaining behavioral diversity and personality differences in social decision-making, with implications for eco-evolutionary patterns and public good dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a novel perceptual rationality model that accounts for behavioral diversity and personality evolution in social interactions, extending traditional bounded rationality approaches.

Findings

Power law distributed perceptual diversity in public goods games

Rational decision-making leads to personality polymorphism and cyclic dynamics

Diversity often hampers public good provision in social dilemmas

Abstract

Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present a perceptual rationality framework in the context of group cooperative interactions, where individuals make rational decisions based on their evolvable perception of the environment. We show that a simple public goods game accounts for power law distributed perceptual diversity. Incorporating the evolution of social information use into the framework reveals that rational decision-making is a natural root of the evolution of consistent personality differences and power-law distributed behavioral diversity. The behavioral diversity, core to the perceptual rationality approach, can lead to ever-shifting polymorphism or cyclic dynamics, through which different rational personality types coexist and engage in mutualistic, complementary, or competitive and exploitative relationships. This polymorphism can lead to non-monotonic evolution as external environmental conditions change. The framework provides predictions consistent with some large-scale eco-evolutionary patterns and illustrates how the evolution of social structure can modify large-scale eco-evolutionary patterns. Furthermore, consistent with most empirical evidence and in contrast to most theoretical predictions, our work suggests diversity is often detrimental to public good provision, especially in strong social dilemmas.