Abstract
Natural selection is often envisaged as the ultimate cause of the apparent rationality exhibited by organisms in their specific habitat. Given the equivalence between selection and rationality as maximizing processes, one would indeed expect organisms to implement rational decision-makers. Yet, many violations of the clauses of rationality have been witnessed in various species such as starlings, hummingbirds, amoebas and honeybees. This paper attempts to interpret such discrepancies between economic rationality (defined by the main axioms of rational choice theory) and biological rationality (defined by natural selection). After having distinguished two kinds of rationality we introduce irrationality as a negation of economic rationality by biologically rational decision-makers. Focusing mainly on those instances of irrationalities that can be understood as exhibiting inconsistency in making choices, i.e. as non-conformity of a given behaviour to axioms such as transitivity or independence of irrelevant alternatives, we propose two possible families of Darwinian explanations that may account for these apparent irrationalities. First, we consider cases where natural selection may have been an indirect cause of irrationality. Second, we consider putative cases where violations of rationality axioms may have been directly favored by natural selection. Though the latter cases (prima facie) seem to clearly contradict our intuitive representation of natural selection as a process that maximizes fitness, we argue that they are actually unproblematic; for often, they can be redescribed as cases where no rationality axiom is violated, or as situations where no adaptive solution exists in the first place.
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Notes
The lack of cognitive abilities in many of the species studied does not prevent to talk about rational decisions, provided that rationality is defined in terms of behavioral outcomes rather than reasons for behaving.
In this latter case, however, we need to assume phenotypic plasticity,—understood as the ability to adjust one’s behaviour to some relevant aspects of one’s environment. For, surely, an organism deprived of any form of agency wouldn’t be properly envisaged as “rational” (or “irrational”) in the first place. Phenotypic plasticity is actually pervasive among animals and plants (West-Eberhard 2005), so this assumption should not be (presumably) very onerous.
Notice that behavioural ecologists do not directly track the fitness function of organisms when they study a given behaviour. They select a variable that is arguably a good proxy for fitness: it can be net energy intake, gross energy intake, in some cases metabolism rates, or more general measures such as inclusive fitness (Davies et al. 2012).
Ecological rationality corresponds in biology to what behavioural economists call “bounded rationality” after Herbert Simon.
Far from contrasting with B-rationality, ecological rationality actually encompasses it: it is underdetermined given that it centers on a utility function defined by a task on which the modeler focuses; and when this task is fitness, it coincides with B-rationality.
Error management theory explains why people avoid drinking in sterile glasses that are used to contain urine samples—as a clear case of overestimating a threat. A prediction would be that, when people prefer, let’s say, green glasses over red glasses, when faced with ternary choice that includes urine sample glass, they would chose red or green glasses stochastically (“any glass is better than the urine glass” being the underlying rationale) and show preference reversal in the face of added independent alternatives.
For related studies, see Houston (1997).
A paradigmatic example of aggregate risk is weather: indeed, if a population of individuals opt (say) for a wet-specialized strategy, then all of them will suffer an equal fitness loss in a dry year (and, equally, an equal fitness gain in a wet year). By contrast, a good example of an idiosyncratic risk is predation risk: indeed, in most cases, being caught by a predator does not imply that another individual with the same behaviour will also be caught by a predator.
If the risk has both an idiosyncratic and an aggregate component, things are different, as we will see in the next section.
More precisely, this is unlikely if we assume that the individuals are “playing against the field”, and not against particular individuals, as in pairwise interactions (Maynard-Smith 1982). For in this latter case, the individuals could possibly use cues or signals correlated with the behaviour of their partner to adopt the best response.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for having raised this important issue.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments, as well as the Evo-Eco group in Paris for helpful discussions of the views presented in this paper. This work is supported by the ANR Grant 13-BSH3-0007 Explabio.
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Huneman, P., Martens, J. The behavioural ecology of irrational behaviours. HPLS 39, 23 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0150-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0150-5