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

2025-06-21

AI Summary

How do organisms achieve rational decision-making through evolvable environmental perception in collective cooperation, thereby driving the emergence and maintenance of behavioral diversity and stable personality differences? Method: We propose a “perceptual rationality” framework that integrates perceptual evolution directly into rational decision-making models, combining evolutionary game theory, public goods games, and social information utilization mechanisms to formalize the coevolution of perception, decision-making, and social structure. Contribution/Results: Theoretical analysis reveals that perceptual diversity generates power-law-distributed behavioral variation, nonmonotonic evolutionary dynamics, and the coexistence of multiple personality types. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we demonstrate that heightened behavioral diversity can suppress public good provision under strong social dilemmas. Our model successfully reproduces macroscopic ecological evolutionary patterns, with predictions showing high concordance across multiscale empirical data—from individual behavior to population-level dynamics.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Behavioral Game Theory
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Multiagent Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Emergent Behavior

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems

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.

Problem

• How perceptual rationality explains evolvable decision-making in groups
• Evolution of social information use drives behavioral diversity
• Impact of perceptual diversity on public good provision dynamics

Innovation

• Evolvable perception-based rational decision-making
• Public goods game explains perceptual diversity
• Social information evolution reveals personality differences