Social traps

Abstract

Uses the term "social trap" to describe situations like a fish trap, where individuals, organizations, and societies get started in a direction that later proves unpleasant or lethal but difficult to back out of; actions or inactions prompted by self-interest create long-range effects that are to almost no one's interest. Skinnerian mechanisms of reinforcement of behavior are applied to this concept. Examples of 3 types of trap are given: the 1-person trap, which may be caused by delay, ignorance, or sliding reinforcers; the group trap, or "missing-hero" type; and the collective trap, caused by too many individuals seeking the same good. Locked-in patterns of collective behavior, characteristic of social traps, are described as the "invisible hand," "the invisible fist," and the "invisible chain." Ways out of the social trap are suggested. "Nested traps"-the most difficult to escape from-are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Full text

Social
Traps
JOHN
PLATT
Mental
Health
Research
Institute
University
of
Michigan
1
A
new
area
of
study
is the field
that some
of us
are
beginning
to
call
social
traps.
The
term refers
to
situations
in
society
that
contain traps formally
like
a fish
trap, where
men or
organizations
or
whole
societies
get
themselves started
in
some
di-
rection
or
some
set of
relationships
that
later
prove
to be
unpleasant
or
lethal
and
that
they
see
no
easy
way to
back
out of or to
avoid.
Two
recent descriptions
of
traps
of
this kind
have already become widely quoted
and
discussed.
The first is
Garrett Hardin's (1968) article
en-
titled "The Tragedy
of the
Commons."
The
title
refers
to
situations like that
of the
Commons,
or
public grassland,
of the old New
England vil-
lages, where anyone could graze
his
cows
freely.
Since
this
is a
"free good"
for the
owners
of
cows,
every owner
can
make money faster
by
increasing
the
number
of
cattle
that
he
grazes there.
But as
everyone's number
of
cattle increases,
the
grass
gets scarcer until
finally it is
destroyed entirely,
and
the
owners collectively wind
up
with
a
loss
rather than
a
gain.
The
trap
is
that
each individ-
ual
owner continues
to do
something
for his in-
dividual
advantage
that
collectively
is
damaging
to
the
group
as a
whole.
Hardin
saw
this
as the
prototype
and
formal
analogue
of the
world population problem, where
each
family
may find
pleasure
and
advantage
in
more
babies;
and the
problem
of
competitive con-
sumption
of
nonrenewable natural resources;
and
1
This
article
is a
report
of
research
in
progress
by
John
Cross,
Mel
Guyer,
Gardner
Quarton,
and the
author,
all of
whom
are
affiliated
with
the
Mental
Health
Research
Institute
of the
University
of
Michigan.
The
article
was
an
invited
address
presented
at the
annual
meeting
of
the
American
Psychological
Association,
Honolulu,
Hawaii,
September
1972.
Requests
for
reprints
should
be
sent
to
John
Platt,
who
is
on
leave
for the
1972-1973
year.
His
address
is
Center
for
Advanced
Study
in the
Behavioral
Sciences,
202
Juni-
pero
Serra
Boulevard,
Stanford,
California
94305.
the
problem
of
competitive extermination
of the
last
great whales.
A
converse type
of
situation might still
be re-
garded
as a
generalized trap,
but
perhaps
is
more
accurately called
a
countertrap.
The
considera-
tion
of
individual advantage prevents
us
from
doing
something
that
might nevertheless
be of
great bene-
fit
to
the
group
as a
whole.
It is, so to
speak,
a
social
fence
rather than
a
social trap.
A
famous,
or
infamous,
example
of
this kind
was
the
Kitty Genovese murder
in New
York
City
a few
years ago,
in
which
a
girl
was
raped
and
killed
in an
areaway while more than
30
neighbors
watched
out the
windows—and
none
of
them called
the
police.
This
apparent
failure
of
concern
and
action produced
a
national wave
of
horror,
as
well
as
much recrimination afterward among
those
in-
volved. Yet,
in
such
a
situation,
it is
clear
that
there
is a
certain individual barrier against calling
the
police.
Not
only must
you
tear yourself away
from
the
spectacle,
but you
face
the
probability
of
having
to
testify
in
court
and
even
a
chance
of
being
hunted down
by the
murderer
or his
friends.
Each observer
may
have
felt
a
strong prick
of
social conscience
at the
time,
but
simply hoped
that
someone else would make
the
troublesome
phone
call
first.
Many contrasting cases
of
this kind have been
discussed
in a
fascinating article
by
Thomas
Schelling (1971), "The Ecology
of
Micromotives."
Schelling
cataloged several dozen type situations
where
individual actions
or
inactions controlled
by
immediate personal goals
or
self-interest, even
rather weak self-interest, produce long-range
so-
cietal
effects
which
are to
almost
no
one's self-
interest.
For
example,
he
demonstrated
how a
population
of
red
people
and
green people distributed
at
random over
a
chessboard
who
move
from
time
to
time
to new
sites
can
become
sharply
segregated
by
color very quickly even
if the
individuals have
AMERICAN
PSYCHOLOGIST
•
AUGUST
1973
• 641