Social Dilemmas, Essay Example

The following essay is about two social dilemmas; prisoners’ dilemma and resource dilemma. It relates each of the dilemmas to social problems in a culture. The essay also explains where each dilemma originated, how the situation can be improved or eliminated and recommendations for each dilemma.

A social dilemma is a state where a person makes a decision that will either affect of negatively a larger group of individuals but will prove to be rewarding to the individual to that choice which will yield satisfactory results, but the individual will be denied immediate benefit.

In the prisoner’s dilemma, the subjects are required to cooperate to gain the moderate rewards but have to compete to gain larger rewards. The set up is in a way where two individuals choose to protect themselves at others participant’s expense, which leads to inefficiency. For example, if prisoners are given a choice to testify, they can keep quiet that is cooperation or testify against each other, which is non-cooperating. As a result, both individuals get themselves in a point where they are in a poorer situation than if they had collaborated in making the decision.

Resource dilemma, on the other hand, is a circumstance where collective interests of people are at odds with their private interest. This arises when one is faced with a choice to prioritize either their own short-term interest or a group’s long-term interest. A social problem occurs as conflict always arises when individual motives overcome the motives of a group.

The recommendation for improving such dilemmas involves studying the conditions in which people cooperate. The first is motivation solution based on the assumption that one is not completely egoistic and that their partners outcomes is given some weight. The other is structural solution where long-term accountability is introduced which influence individual reputations. The strategy used in structural solution aims at changing the rules of the dilemma.

References

May, R. (1967). Psychology and the human dilemma. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand