The Survival Value of Assuming Others to be Rational

I study the evolution of rationality, using an indirect evolutionary approach, in which nature selects a decision-making procedure, and the procedure chooses actions in matching-games. The main result is that in order for (knowledge of) rationality to survive, it is necessary and sufficient that the rational procedure respects the attraction principle. That is, when a rational agent eliminates a strictly dominated action A, he should only increase the choice probability of the actions actually dominating A and not change the choice probability of other undominated actions. The attraction principle sharpens gametheoretic predictions. Attraction effects have been verified in psychological experiments.