In
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
, a social trap is a
conflict of interest
A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another. Typically, this relates to situations i ...
or
perverse incentive
A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers. The cobra effect is the most direct kind of perverse incentive, typically because the incentive unintentional ...
where individuals or a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains, which in the long run leads to a loss for the group as a whole.
Social traps are the cause of countless environmental issues, including
overfishing
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...
, energy "brownout" and "blackout"
power outage
A power outage (also called a powercut, a power out, a power failure, a power blackout, a power loss, or a blackout) is the loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user.
There are many causes of power failures in an electricit ...
s during periods of extreme temperatures, the
overgrazing
Overgrazing occurs when plants are exposed to intensive grazing for extended periods of time, or without sufficient recovery periods. It can be caused by either livestock in poorly managed agricultural applications, game reserves, or nature res ...
of cattle on the
Sahel
The Sahel (; ar, ساحل ' , "coast, shore") is a region in North Africa. It is defined as the ecoclimatic and biogeographic realm of transition between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Having a hot semi-arid c ...
ian Desert, the destruction of the
rainforest
Rainforests are characterized by a closed and continuous tree canopy, moisture-dependent vegetation, the presence of epiphytes and lianas and the absence of wildfire. Rainforest can be classified as tropical rainforest or temperate rainfores ...
by
logging
Logging is the process of cutting, processing, and moving trees to a location for transport. It may include skidding, on-site processing, and loading of trees or logs onto trucks or skeleton cars.
Logging is the beginning of a supply chain ...
interests and
agriculture
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to ...
, and, most importantly,
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
.
Origin of the concept
The term ''social trap'' was first introduced to the scientific community by John Platt's 1973 paper in ''
American Psychologist
''American Psychologist'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. The journal publishes articles of broad interest to psychologists, including empirical reports and scholarly reviews covering science ...
'',
and in a book developed in an interdisciplinary symposium held at the
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
. Building upon the concept of the "
tragedy of the commons
Tragedy (from the grc-gre, τραγῳδία, ''tragōidia'', ''tragōidia'') is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy ...
" in
Garrett Hardin
Garrett James Hardin (April 21, 1915 – September 14, 2003) was an American ecologist. He focused his career on the issue of human overpopulation, and is best known for his exposition of the tragedy of the commons in a 1968 paper of the same t ...
's pivotal article in ''
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
'' (1968),
Platt and others in the seminar applied behavioral
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
concepts to actions of people operating in social traps. By applying the findings of basic research on "schedules of operant reinforcement" (
B.F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
...
1938, 1948, 1953, 1957; Keller and Schoenfeld, 1950), Platt recognized that individuals operating for short-term positive gain ("
reinforcement
In behavioral psychology, reinforcement is a consequence applied that will strengthen an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus. This strengthening effect may be measured as a higher freq ...
") had a tendency to
over-exploit
Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Continued overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource, as it will be unable to replenish. The term ap ...
a resource, which led to a long-term overall loss to society.
The application of behavioral psychology terms to behaviors in the tragedy of the commons led to the realization that the same short-term versus long-term cause-and-effect relationship also applied to other human traps, in addition to the exploitation of commonly held resources.
Types of social traps
Besides defining this psychological phenomenon, Platt also distinguishes between ''social traps'' and ''social fences (countertraps)''.
''Social traps'' represent a behavior or action which prioritizes individual gains at the expense of collective gains. ''Social fence'' refers to a short-term avoidance behavior by individuals that leads to a long-term loss to the entire group.
The missing hero trap is a perfect representation of a social fence. An example is the
Schelling's anecdote of a mattress that falls from a vehicle on a two lane highway. Motorists tend to back up in a traffic jam behind the mattress, waiting for a break in the oncoming traffic to pass around the mattress. 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.
According to Platt, social traps can be categorized into one-person traps (self-traps) and group traps. One-person traps involve the behavior of only a single person rather than a group of people. The basic concept is that an individual's behavior for short-term reinforcers leads to a long-term loss for the individual. Examples of individual traps are
tobacco smoking
Tobacco smoking is the practice of burning tobacco and ingesting the resulting smoke. The smoke may be inhaled, as is done with cigarettes, or simply released from the mouth, as is generally done with pipes and cigars. The practice is believed ...
leading to
lung cancer
Lung cancer, also known as lung carcinoma (since about 98–99% of all lung cancers are carcinomas), is a malignant lung tumor characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissue (biology), tissues of the lung. Lung carcinomas derive from tran ...
or
alcohol
Alcohol most commonly refers to:
* Alcohol (chemistry), an organic compound in which a hydroxyl group is bound to a carbon atom
* Alcohol (drug), an intoxicant found in alcoholic drinks
Alcohol may also refer to:
Chemicals
* Ethanol, one of sev ...
ingestion leading to
cirrhosis
Cirrhosis, also known as liver cirrhosis or hepatic cirrhosis, and end-stage liver disease, is the impaired liver function caused by the formation of scar tissue known as fibrosis due to damage caused by liver disease. Damage causes tissue repai ...
of the liver.
Group traps are situations when the whole collective becomes trapped with long-term negative consequences caused by the pursuit of self-interest by many people before.
Such traps represent many current environmental issues worldwide, especially
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
. Group traps can also be viewed as
collective-action problems, characterized by the cumulation of individual actions into outcomes shared within the group - to solve the problem, collective cooperation is necessary.
Further, it is possible to differentiate between temporal and social traps.
Temporal traps emphasize the time dimension represented by traps: the short-term and long-term benefits and losses, only concerning individuals. In contrast, social traps highlight the individual and collective level of traps, where the time dimension is not necessarily present.
Social dilemmas
The term social trap is generally less known than social dilemma. A few years after John Platt published his article,
Robyn Dawes
Robyn Mason Dawes (July 23, 1936 – December 14, 2010) was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of human judgment. His research interests included human irrationality, human cooperation, intuitive expertise, and the United State ...
created the term social dilemma, which resembles the definition of a group social trap in almost all aspects.
However, Dawes added two more characteristics: the pursuit of self-interest (defection) is more beneficial to an individual than contributing to the collective good (cooperation) regardless of other members' actions, but the overall most beneficial strategy (with the highest payoff) for everyone involved is always to cooperate. Dawes introduced the concept of social dilemmas to embrace both social traps and commons dilemmas, which have similar characteristics.
Various
game theory
Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Myerson, Roger B. (1991). ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' Harvard University Press, p.&nbs1 Chapter-preview links, ppvii–xi It has appli ...
models proved to be valuable tools in testing and exploring the decision-making behavior when faced with a social dilemma. The most attention so far has been given to the well-known
Prisoner's Dilemma
The Prisoner's Dilemma is an example of a game analyzed in game theory. It is also a thought experiment that challenges two completely rational agents to a dilemma: cooperate with their partner for mutual reward, or betray their partner ("defe ...
game.
There are three main categories of social dilemmas: large-scale dilemmas,
commons dilemma
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons ...
s (or resource dilemmas), and public goods dilemmas.
Large-scale dilemmas represent classical group social traps, where seeking short-term personal benefits lead to negative consequences for the whole group.
Commons dilemma
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons ...
s originated from
Hardin's article arise when a scarce common resource shared within a collective becomes depleted because each member desires more than is fair.
Lastly, the public goods dilemma describes a situation where an individual is faced with the dilemma of whether they should contribute to the shared
public good (e.g., taxpayers contributing to national defense or maintenance of public parks) or
free-ride on the contributions of others.
In this case, everyone doesn't need to contribute; only a sufficient number does.
First empirical test and the use of superimposed schedules of reinforcement
The first empirical test of the concept of social traps was by Brechner at
Arizona State University
Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...
, who
operationalized the concepts underlying Platt et al.'s theoretical analysis. By creating a laboratory game, Brechner had groups of college students playing a game where they could accumulate points by pressing buttons for the individual short-term positive rewards of experimental credit in their introductory psychology classes. Players could see a lighted display that indicated the total quantity of points available at any given time in the experiment. Players were told that if they completely drained the pool of points, the game was over and they could not accumulate more points. By responding for points at a moderate rate all the players in the group could accumulate enough points to fulfill their entire semester's experimental requirements. But if one or more players took points for themselves at too fast a rate, the pool would be drained of points and none of the players would achieve the maximum potential experimental credit.
In building the laboratory analogy of social traps, Brechner introduced the concept of "
superimposed schedules of reinforcement".
Skinner
Skinner may refer to:
People and fictional characters
*Skinner (surname), a list of people and fictional characters with that surname
* Skinner (profession), a person who makes a living by working with animal skins or driving mules
*Skinner, a rin ...
and Ferster (1957) had demonstrated that reinforcers could be delivered on schedules (
schedule of reinforcement), and further that organisms behaved differently under different schedules. Rather than a reinforcer, such as food or water, being delivered every time as a consequence of some behavior, a reinforcer could be delivered after more than one instance of the behavior. For example, a
pigeon
Columbidae () is a bird family consisting of doves and pigeons. It is the only family in the order Columbiformes. These are stout-bodied birds with short necks and short slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. They primarily ...
may be required to peck a button switch five times before food is made available to the pigeon. This is called a "ratio schedule". Also, a reinforcer could be delivered after an interval of time passed following a target behavior. An example is a
rat that is given a food pellet one minute after the rat pressed a lever. This is called an "interval schedule". In addition, ratio schedules can deliver reinforcement following fixed or variable number of behaviors by the individual organism. Likewise, interval schedules can deliver reinforcement following fixed or variable intervals of time following a single response by the organism. Individual behaviors tend to generate response rates that differ based upon how the reinforcement schedule is created. Much subsequent research in many labs examined the effects on behaviors of scheduling reinforcers.
When an organism is offered the opportunity to choose between or among two or more simple schedules of reinforcement at the same time, the reinforcement structures are called "
concurrent schedules of reinforcement
In behavioral psychology, reinforcement is a consequence applied that will strengthen an organism's future behavior whenever that behavior is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus. This strengthening effect may be measured as a higher freq ...
". In creating the laboratory analogy of social traps, Brechner created a situation where simple reinforcement schedules were superimposed upon each other. In other words, a single response or group of responses by an organism led to multiple consequences. Concurrent schedules of reinforcement can be thought of as "or" schedules, and
superimposed schedules of reinforcement can be thought of as "and" schedules.
To simulate social traps a short-term positive reward is superimposed upon a long-term negative consequence. In the specific experiment, the short-term positive reinforcer was earning points that applied to class credits. The long-term negative consequence was that each point earned by a player also drained the pool of available points. Responding too rapidly for short-term gains led to the long-term loss of draining the resource pool. What makes the traps social is that any individual can respond in a way that the long-term consequence also comes to bear on the other individuals in the environment.
Superimposed schedules of reinforcement have many real-world applications in addition to generating social traps (Brechner and Linder, 1981; Brechner, 1987; Brechner, 2010). Many different human individual and social situations can be created by superimposing simple reinforcement schedules. For example, a human being could have simultaneous tobacco and alcohol addictions. Even more complex situations can be created or simulated by superimposing two or more concurrent schedules. For example, a high school senior could have a choice between going to Stanford University or UCLA, and at the same time have the choice of going into the Army or the Air Force, and simultaneously the choice of taking a job with an internet company or a job with a software company. That would be a reinforcement structure of three superimposed concurrent schedules of reinforcement. 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 experimentation
Subsequent empirical studies by other researchers explored aspects of social traps other than the underlying reinforcement structure. Studies tended to concentrate on manipulating social and cognitive variables. Cass and Edney (1978) created a simpler game using a bowl of nuts to simulate a commonly held resource. The Nuts Game as they called it had some distinct advantages over Brechner's electronically wired laboratory simulation. The Nuts Game could be transported easily to any environment in or out of the laboratory. It was simple and required no electronics. The reinforcers used were primary food rewards rather than the secondary conditioned reinforcers of class credit used in the earlier study.
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
The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuc ...
.
Summaries of the many other diverse studies of social traps can be found in Messick and McClelland (1983),
Costanza (1984),
Komorita and Parks (1995), Rothstein (2005), and in a more recent review by Van Lange et al. (2013).
Social trap research continues to be an active area. Urlacher (2008) devised an iterated version of the
prisoner's dilemma
The Prisoner's Dilemma is an example of a game analyzed in game theory. It is also a thought experiment that challenges two completely rational agents to a dilemma: cooperate with their partner for mutual reward, or betray their partner ("defe ...
game using groups of people, or "agents", pitted against other groups of agents, in a variation he termed a "two-level social trap". He reported that when using a democratic decision rule, larger groups behaved more cooperatively than smaller groups. Chuang, Rivoire, and Liebler (2009) constructed a non-mammalian commons dilemma using colonies of the
bacteria
Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were among ...
''
Escherichia coli
''Escherichia coli'' (),Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. also known as ''E. coli'' (), is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus ''Escher ...
'' composed of strains of producer and nonproducer microbes that contribute (or do not contribute) to the common resource in an examination of the statistical concept of
Simpson's paradox
Simpson's paradox is a phenomenon in probability and statistics in which a trend appears in several groups of data but disappears or reverses when the groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social-science and medical-science st ...
.
In 2010, Shaimaa Lazem and Denis Gračanin, in the Department of Computer Science at
Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also ...
, took social traps to a new level: into
cyberspace
Cyberspace is a concept describing a widespread interconnected digital technology. "The expression dates back from the first decade of the diffusion of the internet. It refers to the online world as a world 'apart', as distinct from everyday rea ...
. They performed a replication of the original social trap experiment, but created the social trap in the internet virtual world known as
Second Life
''Second Life'' is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi player online virtual world. Developed and owned by the San Fra ...
. They constructed a virtual experimental laboratory with the subjects responding through
avatar
Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearanc ...
s. The findings mirrored the original study, by finding that the ability to communicate led to greater replenishment of common resources.
Social traps and climate change
Social traps and dilemmas represent one of the major causes of ongoing
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
, specifically due to the conflict between self-interest and collective gain. 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
Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities strengthen the greenhouse effect, contributing to climate change. Most is carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. The largest emitters include coal in China and lar ...
in the atmosphere and thus aggravating the harmful effects of
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
. Such defecting (non-cooperative) behavior is frequently strengthened when confronted with the feeling of social and environmental uncertainty, particularly in collective social traps, large-scale dilemmas, and
commons dilemmas.
Social uncertainty, meaning the uncertainty of others actions, and environmental uncertainty, regarding the unpredictability of the resource's availability or abundance, generally prevent cooperation within groups and often lead to taking more than a fair share. 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.
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. In Platt's original article, he proposed some of those - for example, imposing rewards for proenvironmental behavior (e.g., monetary rewards) and punishments for environmentally unfriendly behavior (e.g.,
pollution taxes).
The enforcement of
pollution taxes can be very efficient, for example, in managing
hazardous waste
Hazardous waste is waste that has substantial or potential threats to public health or the environment. Hazardous waste is a type of dangerous goods. They usually have one or more of the following hazardous traits: ignitability, reactivity, co ...
.
In terms of fulfilling climate agreements and global treaties, world governments must be aware of a definite threshold (
temperature
Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer.
Thermometers are calibrated in various temperature scales that historically have relied o ...
,
atmospheric CO2 concentration) that cannot be crossed.
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.
As for promoting cooperation and proenvironmental behavior among people, research shows that people need to believe their actions count and are significant, and they should be aware of the negative consequences of their actions. Also, promoting
altruism
Altruism is the principle and moral practice of concern for the welfare and/or happiness of other human beings or animals, resulting in a quality of life both material and spiritual. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core as ...
and
social norms
Social norms are shared standards of acceptable behavior by groups. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into rules and laws. Social normative influences or soci ...
can become practical tools when attempting to escape social traps and dilemmas.
Additionally, cooperation among group members increases when
group identity
Collective identity is the shared sense of belonging to a group.
In sociology
In 1989, Alberto Melucci published ''Nomads of the Present'', which introduces his model of collective identity based on studies of the social movements of the 1980s ...
is strengthened, and a leader is elected to manage a common resource.
See also
*
Braess's paradox
Braess's paradox is the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it. The paradox was discovered by the German mathematician Dietrich Braess in 1968.
The paradox may have analogies in ...
*
Externality
In economics, an externality or external cost is an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties') activity. Externalities can be considered as unpriced goods involved in either co ...
*
Malthusian trap
Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. This event, c ...
*
Overexploitation
Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Continued overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource, as it will be unable to replenish. The term app ...
*
Overfishing
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...
*
Overgrazing
Overgrazing occurs when plants are exposed to intensive grazing for extended periods of time, or without sufficient recovery periods. It can be caused by either livestock in poorly managed agricultural applications, game reserves, or nature res ...
*
Paradox of thrift
The paradox of thrift (or paradox of saving) is a paradox of economics. The paradox states that an increase in autonomous saving leads to a decrease in aggregate demand and thus a decrease in gross output which will in turn lower ''total'' saving ...
*
Social dilemma
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not.
Etymology
The word "social" derives from ...
*
Tragedy of the commons
Tragedy (from the grc-gre, τραγῳδία, ''tragōidia'', ''tragōidia'') is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy ...
*
Trigger strategy In game theory, a trigger strategy is any of a class of strategies employed in a repeated non-cooperative game. A player using a trigger strategy initially cooperates but punishes the opponent if a certain level of defection (i.e., the trigger) is ...
*
Tyranny of small decisions
The tyranny of small decisions is a phenomenon explored in an essay of the same name, published in 1966 by the American economist Alfred E. Kahn. The article describes a situation in which a number of decisions, individually small and insignifican ...
*
War of attrition
The War of Attrition ( ar, حرب الاستنزاف, Ḥarb al-Istinzāf; he, מלחמת ההתשה, Milhemet haHatashah) involved fighting between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and their allies from ...
*
Welfare trap
The welfare trap (or unemployment trap or poverty trap in British English) theory asserts that taxation and welfare systems can jointly contribute to keep people on social insurance because the withdrawal of means-tested benefits that comes with ...
*
Zero-sum
Zero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation which involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one's gain is e ...
References
Notes
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External links
*http://www.jiskha.com/social_studies/psychology/social_traps.html
*http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/platt_soc_trap.html
*https://web.archive.org/web/20090211010041/http://npg.org/forum_series/balancing_biosphere.htm
{{unintended consequences
Group processes
Figures of speech
Game theory