Perceptual rationality: an evolutionary game theory of perceptually rational decision-making

Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance for understanding behaviour. 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 behavioural diversity. The behavioural 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 by contrast to most theoretical predictions, our work suggests diversity is often detrimental to public good provision, especially in strong social dilemmas.