Your random choices are actually a highly structured strategy your brain uses to prevent other people from predicting your behavior.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
Patterned Stochastic Agency: Context-Dependent Stochasticity in Human Behaviour
SSRN · 6637703
The Takeaway
Human randomness is often dismissed as cognitive noise or a failure to be consistent. New evidence shows that this stochastic behavior is a learnable tool that people deploy more heavily in competitive environments. The brain does not just glitch into a random choice, it executes a specific pattern of inconsistency to gain a tactical advantage. This means that being unpredictable is a functional skill rather than a lack of focus. People who are better at stochastic agency are harder to manipulate because their actions follow a logic that is impossible for others to decode.
From the abstract
Human behaviour is often described as random, yet empirical and computational models treat it as patterned. This paper shows how both properties can arise from a single policy-level mechanism. We introduce Patterned Stochastic Agency (PSA), a model in which behaviour is generated by a structural policy combined with a learned, context-dependent stochastic controller. The structural component captures stable, reason-guided response tendencies, while the stochastic component modulates response dis