Social dilemmas are situations in which individual incentives to defect, free-ride, or pursue self-interest conflict with the collective interest. Classic examples include the Prisoner's Dilemma (mutual defection dominates individually despite mutual cooperation being better for all) and the Tragedy of the Commons (individual incentives to overuse a shared resource lead to depletion despite everyone being worse off).
Social dilemmas require understanding human cooperation mechanisms—reputation, reciprocity, group selection—to explain why cooperation emerges and persists despite individual incentives to defect. In the misinformation context, social dilemmas arise when individuals benefit from not fact-checking or incur costs from accurate information-sharing, while society benefits from an accurate information ecosystem.
Key papers
- Van Lange & Rand (2022) — Human Cooperation and the Crises of Climate Change, COVID-19, and Misinformation — Comprehensive review of cooperation theory applied to three contemporary crises, each understood as a social dilemma. For misinformation specifically, identifies four nested dilemmas: (1) effort dilemma (assessing accuracy is costly), (2) attention dilemma (most false sharing stems from inattention), (3) temptation dilemma (some benefit from intentionally spreading falsehoods), (4) solution dilemma (fact-checking and platform interventions themselves create second-order cooperation challenges).
Related topics
- cooperation — mechanisms enabling cooperation despite individual incentives to defect
- game-theory — formal models of strategic interaction
- collective-action — organizing groups to pursue shared interests