Individually irrational pruning is essential for ecological rationality in a social context

Abstract

Heuristics, commonly thought to violate the full rationality assumptions, are paradoxically indispensable parts of our decision-making and learning processes. To resolve this seemingly paradox, there have been several studies in the literature that aim at finding some broad daily life conditions and situations where employing heuristics are rational. However, these researches mainly focus on non-social conditions, whereas, for human beings, social and individual processes are interwoven and it would be better to study them jointly. Here, we study the role of pruning heuristic in individual reinforcement learning in a social context, where our simulated learning agents make many of their decisions relying on others' knowledge. Our simulation results suggest that the seemingly irrational pruning heuristic leads to less cost in the social settings. That is, we have a meaningfully more social outcome in the presence of this heuristic in social contexts, and social learning helps the agents to learn better where the pruning heuristic is an obstacle in the way of finding the optimal solution in the individual setting. In sum, the synergy between the pruning behavior and social learning leads to ecological rationality.

Keywords: Ecological rationality; Goal-directed system; Habitual system; Heuristics; Model-based; Reinforcement learning; Social learning.