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In psychology, a social trap is a conflict of interest or perverse incentive where individuals or a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains, which in the long run leads to a loss for the group as a whole. Social traps are the cause of countless environmental issues, including overfishing, energy "brownout" and "blackout" during periods of extreme temperatures, the overgrazing of cattle on the Desert, the destruction of the rainforest by logging interests and agriculture, and, most importantly, climate change.
The application of behavioral psychology terms to behaviors in the tragedy of the commons led to the realization that the same short-term versus long-term cause-and-effect relationship also applied to other human traps, in addition to the exploitation of commonly held resources.
According to Platt, social traps can be categorized into one-person traps (self-traps) and group traps. One-person traps involve the behavior of only a single person rather than a group of people. The basic concept is that an individual's behavior for short-term reinforcers leads to a long-term loss for the individual. Examples of individual traps are tobacco smoking leading to lung cancer or alcohol ingestion leading to cirrhosis of the liver.
Group traps are situations when the whole collective becomes trapped with long-term negative consequences caused by the pursuit of self-interest by many people before. Such traps represent many current environmental issues worldwide, especially climate change. Group traps can also be viewed as collective-action problems, characterized by the cumulation of individual actions into outcomes shared within the group - to solve the problem, collective cooperation is necessary.
Further, it is possible to differentiate between temporal and social traps. Temporal traps emphasize the time dimension represented by traps: the short-term and long-term benefits and losses, only concerning individuals. In contrast, social traps highlight the individual and collective level of traps, where the time dimension is not necessarily present.
There are three main categories of social dilemmas: large-scale dilemmas, (or resource dilemmas), and public goods dilemmas. Large-scale dilemmas represent classical group social traps, where seeking short-term personal benefits lead to negative consequences for the whole group. originated from Garrett Hardin's article arise when a scarce common resource shared within a collective becomes depleted because each member desires more than is fair. Lastly, the public goods dilemma describes a situation where an individual is faced with the dilemma of whether they should contribute to the shared public good (e.g., taxpayers contributing to national defense or maintenance of public parks) or free-ride on the contributions of others. In this case, everyone doesn't need to contribute; only a sufficient number does.
In building the laboratory analogy of social traps, Brechner introduced the concept of "superimposed schedules of reinforcement". Skinner and Ferster (1957) (2025). 9780137923090, Prentice-Hall. ISBN 9780137923090 had demonstrated that reinforcers could be delivered on schedules (schedule of reinforcement), and further that organisms behaved differently under different schedules. Rather than a reinforcer, such as food or water, being delivered every time as a consequence of some behavior, a reinforcer could be delivered after more than one instance of the behavior. For example, a pigeon may be required to peck a button switch five times before food is made available to the pigeon. This is called a "ratio schedule". Also, a reinforcer could be delivered after an interval of time passed following a target behavior. An example is a rat that is given a food pellet one minute after the rat pressed a lever. This is called an "interval schedule". In addition, ratio schedules can deliver reinforcement following fixed or variable number of behaviors by the individual organism. Likewise, interval schedules can deliver reinforcement following fixed or variable intervals of time following a single response by the organism. Individual behaviors tend to generate response rates that differ based upon how the reinforcement schedule is created. Much subsequent research in many labs examined the effects on behaviors of scheduling reinforcers.
When an organism is offered the opportunity to choose between or among two or more simple schedules of reinforcement at the same time, the reinforcement structures are called "concurrent schedules of reinforcement". In creating the laboratory analogy of social traps, Brechner created a situation where simple reinforcement schedules were superimposed upon each other. In other words, a single response or group of responses by an organism led to multiple consequences. Concurrent schedules of reinforcement can be thought of as "or" schedules, and superimposed schedules of reinforcement can be thought of as "and" schedules.
To simulate social traps a short-term positive reward is superimposed upon a long-term negative consequence. In the specific experiment, the short-term positive reinforcer was earning points that applied to class credits. The long-term negative consequence was that each point earned by a player also drained the pool of available points. Responding too rapidly for short-term gains led to the long-term loss of draining the resource pool. What makes the traps social is that any individual can respond in a way that the long-term consequence also comes to bear on the other individuals in the environment.
Superimposed schedules of reinforcement have many real-world applications in addition to generating social traps (Brechner and Linder, 1981; Brechner, 1987; Brechner, 2010). Many different human individual and social situations can be created by superimposing simple reinforcement schedules. For example, a human being could have simultaneous tobacco and alcohol addictions. Even more complex situations can be created or simulated by superimposing two or more concurrent schedules. For example, a high school senior could have a choice between going to Stanford University or UCLA, and at the same time have the choice of going into the Army or the Air Force, and simultaneously the choice of taking a job with an internet company or a job with a software company. That would be a reinforcement structure of three superimposed concurrent schedules of reinforcement. An example of the use of superimposed schedules as a tool in the analysis of the contingencies of rent control can be found online in the website "Economic and Game Theory Forum", (Brechner, 2003).
From Platt's and others' initial concept, social trap research has spread to laboratories all over the world and has expanded into the fields of sociology, economics, institutional design, and the nuclear arms race. Summaries of the many other diverse studies of social traps can be found in Messick and McClelland (1983), Costanza (1984), Komorita and Parks (1995), Rothstein (2005), and in a more recent review by Van Lange et al. (2013).
Social trap research continues to be an active area. Urlacher (2008) devised an iterated version of the prisoner's dilemma game using groups of people, or "agents", pitted against other groups of agents, in a variation he termed a "two-level social trap". He reported that when using a democratic decision rule, larger groups behaved more cooperatively than smaller groups. Chuang, Rivoire, and Liebler (2009) constructed a non-mammalian commons dilemma using colonies of the bacteria Escherichia coli composed of strains of producer and nonproducer microbes that contribute (or do not contribute) to the common resource in an examination of the statistical concept of Simpson's paradox.
In 2010, Shaimaa Lazem and Denis Gračanin, in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, took social traps to a new level: into cyberspace. They performed a replication of the original social trap experiment, but created the social trap in the internet virtual world known as Second Life. (2010). 9781424463312 ISBN 9781424463312 They constructed a virtual experimental laboratory with the subjects responding through avatars. The findings mirrored the original study, by finding that the ability to communicate led to greater replenishment of common resources.
There appear to be many strategies to escape or avoid social traps and dilemmas, which could provide valuable input for local and global climate policies. In Platt's original article, he proposed some of those - for example, imposing rewards for proenvironmental behavior (e.g., monetary rewards) and punishments for environmentally unfriendly behavior (e.g., Pollution Taxes). The enforcement of Pollution Taxes can be very efficient, for example, in managing hazardous waste. In terms of fulfilling climate agreements and global treaties, world governments must be aware of a definite threshold (temperature, atmospheric CO2 concentration) that cannot be crossed. The lack thereof might lead to uncertainty, free riding on the contributions of other countries, and thus to the failure to comply with set agreements. As for promoting cooperation and proenvironmental behavior among people, research shows that people need to believe their actions count and are significant, and they should be aware of the negative consequences of their actions. Also, promoting altruism and Social norm can become practical tools when attempting to escape social traps and dilemmas. Additionally, cooperation among group members increases when group identity is strengthened, and a leader is elected to manage a common resource.
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