Social Traps and Temporal Traps
- 1 March 1983
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Vol. 9 (1) , 105-110
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167283091015
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.Keywords
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