Social Traps and Temporal Traps

Abstract

A distinction is drawn between social traps-a noncorrespondence between individual and group outcomes -and temporal traps-a noncorrespondence between short-run and long-run outcomes to an individual. Most real-world social dilemmas involve both kinds of oppositions. An experiment is reported in which the two types of traps are separated Groups performed a resource maintainance task more poorly than did individuals, highlighting the importance of the purely social trap; but individuals failed to perform optimally, indicating that the temporal trap is also important.