[1] Social traps are the cause of countless environmental issues, including overfishing, energy "brownout" and "blackout" power outages during periods of extreme temperatures, the overgrazing of cattle on the Sahelian Desert, the destruction of the rainforest by logging interests and agriculture, and, most importantly, climate change.
[2][3] The term social trap was first introduced to the scientific community by John Platt's 1973 paper in American Psychologist,[1] and in a book developed in an interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of Michigan.
Social fence refers to a short-term avoidance behavior by individuals that leads to a long-term loss to the entire group.
Each individual motorist avoids the opportunity to exit their stopped car and pull the mattress to the side of the road.
The long-term consequence of this avoidance behavior is that all of the motorists (except for perhaps one) arrived at their destinations later than they would have if an individual had removed the mattress barrier.
[9] Various game theory models proved to be valuable tools in testing and exploring the decision-making behavior when faced with a social dilemma.
In building the laboratory analogy of social traps, Brechner introduced the concept of "superimposed schedules of reinforcement".
In addition, ratio schedules can deliver reinforcement following fixed or variable number of behaviors by the individual organism.
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).
Subsequent empirical studies by other researchers explored aspects of social traps other than the underlying reinforcement structure.
Cass and Edney (1978) created a simpler game using a bowl of nuts to simulate a commonly held resource.
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.
[18] Summaries of the many other diverse studies of social traps can be found in Messick and McClelland (1983),[8] Costanza (1984),[18] Komorita and Parks (1995),[19] Rothstein (2005),[20] and in a more recent review by Van Lange et al.
[22] 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.
Social traps and dilemmas represent one of the major causes of ongoing climate change, specifically due to the conflict between self-interest and collective gain.
[24] A practical example of a social trap is when people prefer cars to public transportation - the short-term personal benefit, in this case, represents the comfort and possibly a demonstration of social status, whereas the long-term outcomes of such behavior lead to the rise in the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere and thus aggravating the harmful effects of climate change.
[25] However, research has shown that cooperative behavior under social and environmental uncertainty can be enhanced when the group chooses a trustworthy leader who manages the shared resource justly.
[26] 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.
[2] 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.
[27] 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.