Intro to Cooperation Studies (6)
Social Dilemmas
(Link to clickable concept map of social dilemmas)
It’s more convenient for you to hop in your car to drive somewhere, rather than waiting for public transportation, walking, or riding a bike. When hundreds of millions of people hop in their cars every day in a rush hour that rolls around the time zones, tons of pollutants and increasing traffic jams inconvenience everybody. This is a social dilemma known popularly as “the tragedy of the commons.”
You have something valuable to sell and someone you don’t know in another state wants to buy it. But you aren’t going to ship the valuable until you get the money, and the buyer isn’t going to send the money until you ship the valuable. This social dilemma is known as “the prisoner’s dilemma.”
Peter Kollock defined a social dilemma as a situation where individual rationality adds up to collective irrationality. You and the hundreds of millions of other automobile drivers are caught in an irrational situation of your own creation, as are you and the potential buyer of your valuable. These conflicts, which occur throughout the biological world and reach new levels of complexity when the conflicts involve large numbers of human beings, stem from the fundamental decision every organism has to make when it weighs self-interest against the potential gains or losses of collective action.
In the fourth post in this series, I introduced fundamental texts about the game-theoretic lens on cooperation. Looking through one side of that lens, social dilemmas are seen as cold, calculating, selfish, rational processes — a characterization of human behavior that many question. Turn the lens around and the possibility of working around these dilemmas — by creating institutions for collective action (which I will treat in the next installment) — comes into view. Neither the biological, evolutionary, cultural, game-theoretic, economic, technological, lens alone is adequate for perceiving the multidimensional nature of human cooperation. Taken together, however, and a bigger picture starts to come into focus.
In addition to the following texts, the interactive lecture from the eighth installment of my online course on Intro to Cooperation Studies, and the complete list of recommended texts are available for those who want to dig deeper
Peter Kollock Social Dilemmas (video)
Kollock, who died in a traffic accident in 2009, addressed the Stanford seminar on “A new literacy of cooperation,” led by Andrea Saveri and Howard Rheingold, in 2005.
Peter Kollock: Social Dilemmas (PDF)
After you watch Kollock’s screencast and want to read a superbly written literature review of interdisciplinary research and theory regarding social dilemmas, this paper (PDF download) is essential.
Steven Pinker: The Elephant, the Emperor, and the Matzo Ball (Video)
Steven Pinker’s lecture reveals the relationships between social knowledge and cooperation
Introduction to Social Dilemmas
A good summary and overview
Leon Felkin, The Social Dilemmas (an overview)
This is a succinct overview of social dilemmas, game theory, proposed solutions.
