Social rationality

Social rationality is a form of Bounded rationality applied to social contexts, where individuals make choices and predictions under uncertainty (Hertwig, Hoffrage, & the ABC Research Group, 2012). While game theory deals with well-defined situations, social rationality explicitly deals with situations in which not all alternatives, consequences, and event probabilities can be foreseen. The idea is that, similar to non-social environments, individuals rely, and should rely, on fast and frugal heuristics in order to deal with complex and genuinely uncertain social environments (Hertwig & Hoffrage, 2012). This emphasis on simple rules in an uncertain world contrasts with the view that the complexity of social situations requires highly sophisticated mental strategies, as has been assumed in primate research (Humphrey, 1988) and neuroscience (Seymour & Dolan, 2008), among others.