Social dilemma

A social dilemma is a situation in which an individual profits from selfishness unless everyone chooses the selfish alternative, in which case the whole group loses. Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. A social dilemma is a situation in which an individual profits from selfishness unless everyone chooses the selfish alternative, in which case the whole group loses. Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The prisoner's dilemma is a simple game that serves as the basis for research on social dilemmas. The premise of the game is that two partners in crime are imprisoned separately and each are offered leniency if they provide evidence against the other. As seen in the table below, the optimal individual outcome is to testify against the other without being testified against. However, the optimal group outcome is for the two prisoners to cooperate with each other. A public goods dilemma is a situation in which the whole group can benefit if some of the members give something for the common good but individuals benefit from “free riding” if enough others contribute. Public goods are defined by two characteristics: non-excludability and non-rivalry—meaning that anyone can benefit from them and one person's use of them does not hinder another person's use of them. An example is public broadcasting that relies on contributions from viewers. Since no single viewer is essential for providing the service, viewers can reap the benefits of the service without paying anything for it. If not enough people contribute, the service cannot be provided. In economics, the literature around public goods dilemmas refers to the phenomenon as the free rider problem. The economic approach is broadly applicable and can refer to the free-riding that accompanies any sort of public good. In social psychology, the literature refers to this phenomenon as social loafing. Whereas as free-riding is generally used to describe public goods, social loafing refers specifically to the tendency for people to exert less effort when in a group than when working alone. A replenishing resource management dilemma is a situation in which group members share a renewable resource that will continue to produce benefits if group members do not over harvest it but in which any single individual profits from harvesting as much as possible. The tragedy of the commons is a type of replenishing resource management dilemma. The dilemma arises when members of a group share a common good. A common good is rivalrous and non-excludable, meaning that anyone can use the resource but there is a finite amount of the resource available and it is therefore prone to overexploitation. The paradigm of the tragedy of the commons first appeared in an 1833 pamphlet by English economist William Forster Lloyd. According to Lloyd, 'If a person puts more cattle into his own field, the amount of the subsistence which they consume is all deducted from that which was at the command, of his original stock; and if, before, there was no more than a sufficiency of pasture, he reaps no benefit from the additional cattle, what is gained in one way being lost in another. But if he puts more cattle on a common, the food which they consume forms a deduction which is shared between all the cattle, as well that of others as his own, in proportion to their number, and only a small part of it is taken from his own cattle'. The template of the tragedy of the commons can be used to understand myriad problems, including various forms of resource depletion. For example, overfishing in the 1960s and 1970s led to depletion of the previously abundant supply of Atlantic Cod. By 1992, the population of cod had completely collapsed because fishers had not left enough fish to repopulate the species. A social trap occurs when individuals or groups pursue immediate rewards that later prove to have negative or even lethal consequences. This type of dilemma arises when a behavior produces rewards initially but continuing the same behavior produces diminishing returns. Stimuli that cause social traps are called sliding reinforcers, since they reinforce the behavior in small doses and punish it in large doses. An example of a social trap is the use of vehicles and the resulting air pollution. Viewed individually, vehicles are an adaptive technology that have revolutionized transportation and greatly improved quality of life. But their current widespread use causes negative externalities. In many places air pollution continues unabated because the convenience of driving a car is immediate and the environmental costs are distant and often do not become obvious until much later.