Social Dilemma

In the past two decades, interest in social dilemmas has grown considerably, with research in this area attracting researchers from diverse fields including economics, psychology, neuroscience and anthropology. Social dilemmas arise when there is a conflict between individual and collective interests, with the cost to the individual potentially outweighing the benefits to the group. This disjunction is created by externalities, which generate a social dilemma. The tragedy of social dilemmas is that no individual has an incentive to change their behavior, even though everyone will be worse off, because it is not a feature of the agents involved but of the structure of the game. Examples of social dilemmas include informed voting and energy conservation.