Generative Rationality

In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as “intuitive statisticians” while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as “probing organisms.” We first highlight how ecological rationality’s focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: (a) the problem of cue salience, and (b) the problem of cue novelty in teeming environments. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that underlies ecological rationality, by discussing its origins in the field of psychophysics (e.g., signal detection, just-noticeable-differences). We work through the most popular experiment in the ecological rationality literature—the city-size task—to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology, in contrast to ecological rationality’s focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given and available for statistical processing. Environments “teem” with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and organism-directed probing that shapes perception and judgment. Generative rationality departs from existing bounded and ecological approaches in that cue salience is given by top-down factors rather than the bottom-up, statistical or physical properties. A central premise of generative rationality is that cues in teeming environments are noticed or recognized when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a “cue-to-clue” transformation. Awareness toward relevant cues needs to be actively cultivated or “grown.” Thus we argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. The generative approach not only applies to seemingly mundane organism (including human) interactions with their environments—as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature—but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic and other uncertain settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with—but modify—Herbert Simon’s popular “scissor” metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments.