idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
A new study shows that apparently erratic or “sloppy” behaviour in strategic situations is not necessarily a mistake. Under certain conditions, being less sensitive to one’s own gains can become a long-term advantage.
To the Point
• Strategic learning: Researchers investigate when evolution may favour less precise decision-making.
• Unexpected advantage: Being highly sensitive to gains does not always lead to the best outcome.
• Behavioural diversity: In coordination games, different behavioural profiles can coexist over time.
People make strategic decisions all the time: during negotiations, when coordinating actions with others, or when choosing partners for cooperation. In such situations, the outcome often depends not only on what one person does, but also on what others do. But could occasional imprecision, erratic learning or seemingly suboptimal choices ever become an advantage?
A new study by Marta C. Couto, Fernando P. Santos and Christian Hilbe, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), addresses this question using mathematical and computational models from evolutionary game theory. The researchers are affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, the University of Amsterdam and the Interdisciplinary Transformation University in Austria.
At the centre of the study is outcome sensitivity: the degree to which individuals respond to the perceived success of a strategy. Highly sensitive individuals are more likely to adopt strategies they see as successful. Less sensitive individuals learn in a noisier and more erratic way, making them more likely to act sub-optimally. Many previous models assume that this sensitivity is the same for everyone and remains constant over time. But human populations are heterogeneous and adaptive.
Why lower sensitivity can sometimes pay off
The researchers therefore consider two timescales. In the short run, each individual has a fixed sensitivity and learning process, with which they learn how to behave in strategic interactions. In the long run, the researchers ask whether outcome sensitivity itself can become a trait subject to natural selection.
One example is the so-called donation game. Here, each individual decides whether to provide a benefit to another at a cost to themselves. In this game, the researchers observe that individuals who are highly sensitive to gains tend to donate less, and therefore obtain higher returns.
The picture changes in the snowdrift game. Imagine a shared office kitchen: everyone likes it clean and tidy, but each person would prefer someone else to do the cleaning. If nobody cleans, however, everyone loses. In such a situation, being less sensitive to gains can be strategically useful. Those who care less about the immediate benefit of a clean kitchen clean less often, thereby leading more sensitive individuals to do the work instead. Similar effects are known in psychology as “strategic incompetence” and in biology as the “red-king effect”.
The researchers then asked what happens in the long term. Suppose a population is initially insensitive to outcomes, with all individuals acting randomly. Would a single individual who is slightly more sensitive gain an advantage over the others? And if so, where would this sensitivity eventually converge?
Computer simulations show that in situations such as the donation game, sensitivity almost always evolves towards ever-increasing values. In most snowdrift games, by contrast, sensitivity first increases but eventually stops at a finite value. At a certain point, becoming even more sensitive no longer provides an additional benefit.
When evolution creates different behavioural profiles
Coordination games follow a different trajectory again. Here, the evolutionary process can reach a branching point at which the population begins to diverge in opposite directions. Some individuals tend to become less sensitive, while others become ever more sensitive. Eventually, diverse behavioural profiles can coexist.
The findings have important implications for understanding how people make everyday decisions. “According to our study, noisy or erratic behaviour does not need to be a by-product of cognitive constraints,” says Marta Couto, lead author of the study. “Instead, it can serve as a means to gain long-term strategic advantages.”
Marta C. Couto
Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems Group, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1098XH, The Netherlands
Max Planck Research Group on the Dynamics of Social Behavior, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön 24306, Germany
Marta C. Couto, Fernando P. Santos und Christian Hilbe (2026): Evolution of noisy learning in games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2529959123
In some scenarios, being highly sensitive to short-term results may not lead to the best possible ou ...
Source: Marta C. Couto
Copyright: Marta C. Couto
Criteria of this press release:
Journalists, Scientists and scholars, Students
Biology, Mathematics
transregional, national
Miscellaneous scientific news/publications, Research results
English
In some scenarios, being highly sensitive to short-term results may not lead to the best possible ou ...
Source: Marta C. Couto
Copyright: Marta C. Couto
You can combine search terms with and, or and/or not, e.g. Philo not logy.
You can use brackets to separate combinations from each other, e.g. (Philo not logy) or (Psycho and logy).
Coherent groups of words will be located as complete phrases if you put them into quotation marks, e.g. “Federal Republic of Germany”.
You can also use the advanced search without entering search terms. It will then follow the criteria you have selected (e.g. country or subject area).
If you have not selected any criteria in a given category, the entire category will be searched (e.g. all subject areas or all countries).
