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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Salahshour, Mohammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Salahshour, Mohammad
author_facet Salahshour, Mohammad
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Perceptual Rationality: An Evolutionary Game Theory of Perceptually Rational Decision-Making
Salahshour, Mohammad
Populations and Evolution
Computer Science and Game Theory
Physics and Society
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.
title Perceptual Rationality: An Evolutionary Game Theory of Perceptually Rational Decision-Making
topic Populations and Evolution
Computer Science and Game Theory
Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17724