Background and Objectives
Traditional evolutionary game theory has relied on bounded rationality. While this approach has led to important insights, it has often neglected the fact that individuals’ decisions are shaped by their perception. We propose a perceptual rationality framework in which the agents are rational and play the Nash equilibrium of their game, however, based on their evolvable perception of the game payoffs and possibly on socially acquired information. We apply this to public goods games to explore how evolving perceptions and social learning drive the emergence of cooperation, diversity, and consistent personality traits.
Methods
In N‑player public goods games (with the group size g), each agent evolves personal cost and benefit perceptions and plays the Nash equilibrium of the game. Equally, an evolvable social trait weights the private and group-averaged perception. We perform evolutionary simulations in both well-mixed and lattice-structured populations and use replicator–mutator dynamics and an evolutionary stability analysis to gain theoretical insights.
Results
Without social learning, cooperation requires the enhancement factor r>g. Introducing social susceptibility fosters the cooperation at a lower r, especially for networks. Even simple games yield power-law distributions of the perceived benefit-to-cost ratios (exponent ≈–2), and social learning amplifies the perceptual and social diversity. Agents with prosocial private perceptions become more social, while antisocial perceptions correlate with individualism—showing consistency in emergent personalities. No pure evolutionarily stable strategy exists in the binary model; instead, polymorphic cyclic dynamics emerge via complementary roles (conditional cooperators, defectors, randomizers). High perceptual/social diversity can hinder the cooperation under strong dilemmas but enhance it when the dilemmas weaken; models with a single evolvable perceptual trait achieve higher cooperation. Stochastic multiplicative processes reproduce macro-ecological laws (species lifespans ~–2, abundance ~–2.5, Taylor’s exponent ~1, 1/f spectral scaling), and evolving sociality shifts these exponents, linking the social structure to biodiversity patterns.
Conclusions
Perceptual rationality unifies rational decision-making with evolvable perception and social learning, explaining cooperation, power-law diversity, consistent personalities, and macroecological patterns in a single framework.
