Social dilemmas are situations in which each of a group of interdependent people faces a conflict between the maximization of personal gain and collective interest. In this essay, we emphasize two types of social dilemmas. Public goods dilemmas occur when individuals can choose whether to contribute to a common pool that benefits both contributors and non-contributors alike, as long as enough choose to contribute. Resource dilemmas occur when individuals can choose how much to withdraw for personal use from a common pool that will only be maintained if withdrawals are kept to a minimum. Past research has shown that the opportunity to communicate has a large impact on cooperation rates in these two types of social dilemmas. Here, we review research that provides possible explanations for this impact. However, the communication process through which cooperation is forged has received little attention, providing a research opportunity for communication scholars.

The severely depleted lobster and fish stocks in the sea off Port Judith, Rhode Island, carry one dominant implication. All—the fish, the marine ecosystems, and the fishers—suffer because of a system of open-access fishing. Lobstermen in this area are faced with the prospect of sailing as many as 70 miles out to sea each trip, hauling over 300 steel lobster traps a day, and even facing violence from “harbor gangs” should the informal divisions of the nearby seabed be violated. Meanwhile, only 10% of the region’s lobsters, with a normal life expectancy of 50 to 75 years, live beyond six years of age, or grow beyond two pounds, even though lobstermen report catching 30-pound lobsters a little over 50 years ago (Tierney, 2000). One reason for this ecologically unstable situation is insufficient communication and coordination among the fishers of this area.

In stark contrast, fishers in Port Lincoln in Southern Australia have created solutions that have worked to the advantage of all parties. In the 1960s, the Australian government restricted the total number of licenses to which fishers had access. To maintain the future sale value of these licenses, fishers have negotiated amongst themselves and agreed to self-regulate. They adhere to the strict harvesting limit of 60 traps each and pay scientists to monitor the health of the fishery. The returns of maintaining optimal lobster and tuna stocks, both economically and in terms of reduced labor hours, are enormous (Tierney, 2000).

The fact is, when people communicate openly about such “resource dilemmas,” as these types of situations have come to be known, the “dilemmas” inherent in them become more manageable. Resource dilemmas are one example of a general type of social situation called a “social dilemma.” Social dilemmas, arising out of the interdependence that exists among groups of human beings, offer individuals the choice of either gaining individual benefits in the short run or restraining themselves so that the group reaps benefits in the long run. Decision theorists (Dawes, McTavish, & Shaklee, 1977), ecologists (Edney & Harper, 1978), economists (Isaac & Walker, 1988), political scientists (Ostrom, Walker, & Gardner, 1992), and social psychologists (Brechner, 1976) have demonstrated repeatedly, in experimental settings, the robustness of communication as a way of increasing cooperation among research participants and, in so doing, ensuring success in the management of social dilemmas. More recent research (e.g., Kerr, Garst, Lewandowski, & Harris, 1997) has explored the reasons for this impact. In addition, political scientists (Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994) have examined the conditions under which negotiations have led to agreed-upon resource-management strategies in real-world resource dilemmas. In both the laboratory and “real life,” communication can foster cooperation and often prevents the sacrifice of the long-term collective good over short-term individual gain.

Unfortunately, the communication scholar has yet to be heard on this matter. Repeated demonstrations that communication has a huge impact on cooperation, and studies revealing why communication has that impact, do not tell us how that impact occurs. Some past research has included informal observations of the content of discussion among research participants, and a couple of studies have even incorporated quantitative measures of discussion, but none of them are particularly informative about the interactive processes by which an aggregate of people with good reasons not to cooperate with one another can become a cooperative group and achieve a common good. Social psychologists, political scientists, and the like are not trained to examine communication content and process and may not even understand the importance of doing so. But communication scholars are so trained and know why it matters.

The goal of this essay is to provide a review of the research concerning the impact of communication on cooperation rates in experimental simulations of social dilemmas. In so doing, we emphasize the extent to which this research supports a series of proposed explanations for effects. We also make some suggestions about the contribution that communication scholarship can make to our understanding of these critical social situations. We begin with a general description of social dilemmas and more specific descriptions of two types of social dilemmas; resource and public goods.

Social Dilemmas

Our understanding, in the social sciences, of social dilemmas has grown out of game theory, a theoretical perspective used by economists to strategically analyze conflicts of interests (Van Lange, Liebrand, Messick, & Wilke, 1992). Game theory has been an exciting development for social scientists in that it offers a way to analyze human behavior in situations of interdependence and conflict. Social dilemmas develop when there is a “correspondence of outcomes” among those involved (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978)—in other words, correlated outcomes experienced by interdependent individuals. This interdependency implies that each individual’s actions have an impact on everyone involved. Interdependent situations can range from purely cooperative (a gain for one person is a gain for the others) to purely competitive (a gain for one person is a loss for the others). Intermediate between these extremes are “mixed-motive” situations, in which a gain for one can be either a gain or a loss for the others, depending on the specific behavioral choices made by each.

Social dilemmas are a type of mixed-motive situation. Interaction in social dilemmas is characterized by a conflict between an individual’s desire to maximize personal (selfish) interests and his or her motive to maximize collective interests (Komorita & Parks, 1996). A desire to maximize one’s own gain is known as a defecting choice, while a desire to maximize the gain of the collective is known as a cooperative choice. When an individual chooses to defect, she or he makes an individually rational decision to maximize her or his gain as opposed to the collective gain. This is because an individual always receives a higher payoff, at least in the short run, when she or he makes a defecting choice, no matter what decisions all other individuals make. The result, however, is that if all parties involved make the defecting choice, all will suffer in the long run. Thus, everyone is better off if all cooperate than if all defect (Dawes, 1980).

Consider the example of a fish pond. Let us say that there is a pond with 25 fish in it, and five people fishing from it. We will presume that the fish in the pond can reproduce 20% of their population every week. In the course of the first week, these original 25 would reproduce five more fish. If each person were to take five of the fish at the beginning of that week, 20 of the 25 would be gone, and the five that were left could only reproduce one more fish in that week. There would only be six in the pool for the people to share during the next week. If, instead, each person harvested only one fish a week, the five would have 52 fish apiece over the course of a year. In addition, they would still have the original 25 in the pond.

In game theory language, the defecting choice is known as the “dominant strategy” (Dawes, 1980). Game theory suggests that all players will choose the dominant strategy and the result will be a state of equilibrium. However, because the dominant strategy produces less preferred outcomes, it is known to be a deficient outcome. Dawes (1980), therefore, defined a social dilemma as one in which all players have a dominant strategy that results in a deficient equilibrium. Although there are other types, [1] we limit our discussion to two types of social dilemmas: public goods and resource. We turn to each of them next.

Public Goods Dilemmas

An example of a public good is a public television station. Public television stations receive most of their funding from private donors (Komorita & Parks, 1996); viewer contribution, therefore, is essential to the continued existence of such stations. Two factors contribute to the fact that a public good presents individuals with a social dilemma (Komorita & Parks, 1996). First, no matter how many individuals use them, public goods cannot be used up. Consequently, no matter how many viewers tune in to watch public television programming, it will not run out. Second, non-contributors cannot be excluded. Once a public television station begins to transmit programming, it cannot prevent non-contributors from also watching. This presents a social dilemma for the viewers of this programming. Because they cannot be excluded from the use of this “good,” it is, in game theoretic terms, rational for them to not contribute and yet continue to enjoy the programming. However, the situation creates a conflict between individual and collective rationality. Although one person’s decision to not contribute does not have a significant impact on the quality or quantity of programming that is broadcast, if too many acted in this way, the television station would not have the funds to continue broadcasting and would eventually have to shut down. Although in the short term all non-paying viewers would have benefited, everyone would suffer in the end.

People’s responses to public goods dilemmas significantly affect the quality of civic life. Resources dilemmas, however, have the added dimension of also affecting the health of our natural resources. Solutions to preserve and enhance their health therefore are of significant value.

Resource Dilemmas

Common-pool resources (resources that are available to all users) such as electricity, water, and clean air are increasingly in short supply and these shortages are symptomatic of less-than-optimal utilization (Kramer, McClintock, & Messick, 1986). In other words, these shortages exemplify what Hardin (1968) described as the tragedy of the commons. In his essay on overpopulation, Hardin used the example of a pasture or commons on which all the herds-people of a community graze their cattle, and the number of cattle is at a level where they can be supported optimally by the land. In this scenario, one of the herds-persons, in trying to maximize her or his gain, experiences increased returns from the addition of one animal, with the corresponding negative effect that this addition leads to an overgrazing of the land. However, because all the herds-people share this negative effect, the defecting herds-person effectively experiences only a fraction of it. Each rational herds-person reaches this same conclusion and adds an animal to his or her own herd. As Hardin (1968) writes, “Therein, lies the tragedy. Each man [woman] is locked into a system that compels him [her] to increase his [her] herd without limit—in a world that is limited” (p. 1244; words in brackets added). In the end, all the herds-people suffer because the commons is finally used up (or more literally, as Hardin describes, the land suffers from soil erosion and the appearance of weeds).

More generally, a resource dilemma is a situation in which a group shares a common resource (e.g., water, forest, fitness equipment, parking space) from which individual members can freely harvest. If members take too much of this resource (e.g., using water inefficiently, cutting down too many trees, using gym equipment for too long a period, or having more cars than there are parking spaces), the resource is exhausted (i.e., limited water supplies, depleted forest cover, crowded gyms and parking lots). As with public goods dilemmas, individuals encountering resource dilemmas are confronted with a conflict between individual and collective rationality. In the interest of the group, moderate usage of the resource is the most preferred solution; however, in the interest of the individual, it is most rational to use the resource maximally. The consequence of individually rational behavior in such a situation has been characterized by Wade-Benzoni, Tenbrunsel, and Bazerman (1996) as “collective non-cooperation,” yielding two outcomes: a small positive individual outcome that is immediate and a large negative collective outcome (the depletion of future resources) that is delayed. Resource dilemmas thus differ from public goods in that the yield from a common resource pool is subtractable and consumption between consumers is rival (Gardner, Ostrom, & Walker, 1994).

Managing Social Dilemmas

Research on social dilemmas is extensive, covering many causes, explanations, and specific factors in an effort to understand their governing dynamics. The underlying reason for this research is clear: It is important to understand how social dilemmas or perceptions of social dilemmas can be altered, so as to make the cooperative (as opposed to the defecting) choice the most rational one. One possible tactic for encouraging cooperative choice is to change the payoff structure of a social dilemma through a system of rewards and penalties to make the cooperative choice the one that receives the higher payoff. However, as Dawes (1980) pointed out, to introduce such a system implies that the governing body must bear heavy expenditures. This expenditure might, in effect, reduce the payoffs to all (those who cooperate freely, those coerced by penalties, and those who are rewarded for cooperative behavior). Clearly, rewards and penalties are often an inefficient way to increase the rate of cooperation. Consequently, findings that communication about a dilemma among the people facing it raises rates of cooperation substantially takes on added significance.

Communication in Social Dilemmas

The experimental study of research participants’ reactions to resource and public goods dilemmas began in the 1970s as a consequence of essays such as Hardin’s (1968) on the tragedy of the commons and analogous work on public goods dilemmas (Olson, 1965). Although the details are, of course, study-specific, a general paradigm emerged. In the prototypic resource dilemma study, participants have the opportunity to withdraw a resource (“harvest”) for their own use from a pool that replenishes between rounds (e.g., the pool available for a given round is 1.2 times greater than what was remaining after the last round). The pool might be introduced as, for example, a fishery, bank account, or electric power supply that needs to be maintained. The game may last numerous rounds if the pool is maintained, but ends abruptly if over-harvesting depletes it. In the prototypic public goods study, participants begin with a personal endowment that they can either keep or contribute to a common pool, usually described as a shared bank account. If a given amount is contributed, the pool plus a substantial bonus is divided equally among all participants; if less than that amount is contributed, the pool is lost.[2] In both paradigms, participants are either paid outright for their earnings or given a chance at obtaining a prize for achieving a good outcome; either method appears to be successful in increasing participants’ motivation to perform well in the dilemma.

These prototypic research designs allow for the manipulation of factors such as the size of the personal advantage for cooperation rather than defection, asymmetry among participants (some participants have larger endowments in public goods games or can take more out of a resource pool), and uncertainty in the size of a resource pool or the amount needed to be contributed to gain a public good. Undoubtedly, earlier findings pointing to the role of communication as a spur to cooperation in dyadic conflict (Deutsch, 1960) were influential, as comparisons of conditions with and without communication among group members appeared in several of the earliest resource dilemma studies. Jerdee and Rosen (1974) were the first to find the effect, which turned out to be breathtakingly large in some cases. Dawes et al. (1977) found the presence of communication to increase cooperation rates from 30 to 72 percent. Brechner (1976) observed that the presence of communication led to a more than five-fold increase in resource pool replenishment in one condition. Analogous, if less extreme, findings for public goods games have appeared in about 20 publications since 1983.

The question that needs to be addressed is why communication has such dramatic effects on the rate of cooperation. A number of conceivable mechanisms have been proposed, with Bornstein (1992b) providing a useful list of possibilities:

(1) Communication helps group members come to understand the situation through clarification of the implications of various choices.

(2) Communication allows group members to coordinate their actions through exchanging information about intended choices.

(4) Communication is part of a process leading to the emergence of cooperative social norms.

(5) Communication is used strategically to form agreements, make promises, and commit to cooperate.

(6) Communication helps members establish a group identity, which fosters cooperation in turn.

The first of these possibilities, that communication increases group members’ understanding of the situation, has failed to gain research support. In a resource dilemma study, Edney and Harper (1978) found greater total harvesting and greater number of rounds before depletion for a communication condition not only in comparison with a no-communication control condition but also in comparison with a no-communication condition in which the experimenters warned the participants about the depletion problem and in a no-communication condition in which the experimenters gave the participants a good strategy for maintaining the resource pool. In a public goods dilemma study, Kerr and Kaufman-Gilliland (1994) found that receiving comments from earlier game players or overhearing a discussion from an earlier game did not increase cooperation over a no-communication condition. These findings imply that group members’ understanding of the situation does not increase their cooperation.

The bulk of the extant research is relevant to the last four possibilities. Researchers have generally pitted possibilities 3 (trust enhancement), 4 (norm emergence), and 5 (strategic use), working together in some fashion, against possibility 6 (group identity formation). A review of this research seems to warrant five relevant empirical generalizations, all in favor of the 3-4-5 coalition. Although not explicit in the research studies, possibility 2 (coordination) is also implied by some of these findings.

First, communication within the group must be task relevant. In the Dawes et al. (1977) study, the proportion of cooperators was no greater with communication irrelevant to the dilemma than with no communication at all. Bouas and Komorita (1996) found analogous results in a public goods task. These findings speak against group identity establishment as a major factor, because if it were, then task-irrelevant communication would be as effective as task-relevant. Both groups of researchers also found participant estimates of the proportion of others who would cooperate to parallel actual cooperation, which implies that communication increases the expectation of cooperation among members. This finding would be consistent with the trust enhancement and norm emergence explanations.

Second, voiced commitments to cooperate are usually effective. Neidert and Linder (1990) found that voiced commitments to conserve resource pools led to far better conservation than in control groups lacking such commitments, supporting the norm emergence and strategic use explanations. In public goods research, Orbell, van de Kragt and Dawes (1988) found voiced commitments to give to correlate +.59, and voiced commitments not to give to correlate -.51, with actual giving. In informal content analyses in a series of studies, Bornstein (1992a, 1992b; Bornstein, Rapoport, Karpel, & Katz, 1989) noted that communication within groups usually led to agreements to contribute to a public good, and group members defected from that agreement less that 5% of the time, findings that clearly support the strategic use explanation. (However, there is contrary evidence from these same studies.) A long series of public goods studies by a group of political scientists (Hackett, Dudley, & Walker, 1995; Hackett, Schlager, & Walker, 1994; Ostrom & Walker, 1991) found the same result, although defection rates were somewhat greater. Defection tended to elicit sharp verbal responses (e.g., “Some scumbucket is investing more than we agreed on”), which often were successful in gaining compliance in later rounds. Dawes et al. (1977) reported that similar comments occurred during resource dilemma tasks. Participants tended to respond to defections from agreements by continuing to cooperate, except for a few cases in which defection worsened over time and the cooperators gave up. In the Hackett et al. (1994, 1995) studies, participants were given asymmetric endowments and usually reached explicit agreements about how much should be contributed by those with large and small endowments. This finding seems consistent with the coordination explanation.

Third, communication increases cooperation even when only outside groups will profit. Several studies (Braver, 1995; Braver & Wilson, 1986; Orbell, van de Kragt, & Dawes, 1988; van de Kragt, Dawes, Orbell, Braver, & Wilson, 1986) have found that communication increases cooperation in public goods tasks when any earnings from the task would go to people outside the group. This result seems contrary to group identity formation and supportive of norm emergence and strategic use as explanations. Orbell et al. (1988, 1991) performed some content analyses of the discussion that are instructive, if inconsistent, in their implications. Particularly important is the fact that when (and only when) communication was present, the odds of individual members actually contributing after having promised to do so was far greater when the group was unanimous in contributing than when the group was less than unanimous, whereas individuals in groups where almost everyone promised to contribute were only a bit more likely to fulfill the commitment than people in groups where nobody promised. This is strong support for the norm emergence and strategic use explanations. However, the number of members who made promises to contribute correlated only .25 with their perceived expectation of other group members’ contributing, contrary to norm emergence, and correlated only .03 with their own cooperation, contrary to strategic use.

Fourth, perceived group reciprocity is an important factor encouraging reciprocity among members. In a public goods dilemma study, Chen and Komorita (1994) found that “minimum binding pledges” (in which everybody states an amount they are willing to contribute and is obligated to give the lowest amount pledged) and “mean binding pledges” (obligations to give the average of the pledges) were followed much more often than non-binding pledges or binding pledges to give the amount promised. The expectation of group reciprocity seems to be at the heart of this finding, in support of the norm emergence explanation.

Fifth, there is direct evidence that group identity is irrelevant to cooperation. In a follow-up to Chen and Komorita (1994), Chen (1996) found that communication before a mean binding pledge led to greater perceptions of group identity than absence of communication, but no increases in mean contributions. Bouas and Komorita (1996) found that participant judgments of group identity did not differ between their relevant communication and irrelevant communication conditions and was far lower in a no-communication condition, yet cooperation was greater in the relevant communication than the irrelevant communication and no-communication conditions, implying that the opportunity to communicate increased group identity but had no impact on cooperation rates. Kerr and Kaufman-Gilliland (1994) also found evidence that communication increases group identity and cooperation, but that group identity had no relationship with cooperation.

These findings led Kerr and Kaufman-Gilliland (1994) and Gardner et al. (1994) to argue for factors other than group identity formation as crucial to the communication-cooperation relationship. However, in addition to the finding by Orbell et al., two sets of studies provide some support for its impact. Bornstein and Rapoport (1988) set up a situation in which two three-member groups competed against one another for a public goods provision, such that the group that contributed the most got the provision. If the groups gave the same amount, the provision would be evenly split between them. In a simple comparison, the presence of communication within each group led to a far greater contribution rate than its absence. Bornstein et al. (1989) extended this design to allow for a contrast among different communication conditions within and between the two groups. Within-group communication alone led to an analogous contribution rate as in Bornstein and Rapoport (1988); conditions with communication both within and between groups led to similar findings as no communication did previously; and communication between groups alone led to very little cooperation. In short, communication between groups seemed to foster inter-group competition. In fact, examination of the discussions revealed that 14 of the 16 within-communication groups agreed to contribute, and members of those groups defected only 4.8% of the time. In contrast, 62 of the 64 groups in any of the conditions including between-group communication agreed not to contribute, which should have led to a tie, but defection rates were around 40%. A defection in this case increases the chances of one’s own group obtaining the public good at the expense of the other group. Thus, communication alone did not lead to binding agreements unless they were within-group only, contrary to the strategic use explanation in particular and consistent with group identity formation. In further studies using similar games, Bornstein (1992a, 1992b) also found communication between groups to result in a lower contribution rate than no communication at all, and Bornstein (1992b) found a repetition of the relatively high defection rate after agreements between groups not to communicate.

Further support for the group identity explanation comes from a public goods study by Schwartz-Shea and Simmons (1991), in which participants first chose whether or not to contribute to their group and then whether to switch their contribution to a third party. The presence of communication decreased both defection to self and switching to the third party as compared to no communication, which might imply a group identity effect. However, in an earlier study with the same basic design (Schwartz-Shea & Simmons, 1990), communication led to a greater likelihood of participants switching to the third party than of contributing to their own group, a finding which speaks against the group identity explanation.

Social Dilemmas and Communication Scholarship

As this review of research shows, we know that communication increases cooperation when people are confronted with social dilemmas. We also know why it does so, but we have very little knowledge about how the effect occurs. In some fashion, an aggregate of research participants with all the reason in the world not to cooperate with one another more often than not turns into a group with an emergent norm to cooperate, a strategy for how to do so, and sufficient trust that the norm and the strategy will be adhered to by one another. Moreover, participants generally follow the norm and the strategy and fulfill one another’s trust. The informal content analyses mentioned previously hardly answer the question of how this process occurs. Apparently, the researchers who provided us with the findings described in our review either did not know how to or did not care to study the content and process of the interaction out of which cooperative groups emerged. This provides the challenge to communication scholars to complete the picture this early research has begun.

In short, the task of communication scholars in the area of social dilemmas is to create something comparable to the existing literatures on group discussion (e.g., Bales, 1953; Poole & Roth, 1989) and negotiation (Olekalns & Smith, 2000; Weingart, Prietula, Hyder, & Genovese, 1999), which have given us at least some insight into how decisions are made and agreements forged in these circumstances. These literatures were primarily established through the detailed examination of what can be called experimental simulations, in which research participants made group decisions or reached negotiated agreements in the context of some form of scenario or game. The paradigmatic research designs for resource and public goods dilemmas described earlier in this essay qualify as experimental simulations and would provide the most direct method for establishing a literature about communication during social dilemmas. It is true that the over-reliance of researchers on experimental simulations has led to a circumstance in which much of what we believe we know about group discussion and negotiation is based on the actions of group members with no past history working together and no good reason for taking their task seriously (Bormann, 1970; Putnam & Stohl, 1990). In the case of social dilemmas, however, the standard practice of providing financial rewards for participation probably provides adequate motivation for serious performance, and research has made it clear that, at least when communication is available, participants usually come to consider themselves a working group.

In contrast with most of the research applying these paradigms reviewed herein, videotaped records of the discussions would be transcribed and detailed examinations of the content of the transcripts undertaken. The results of those examinations would then be correlated with the outcomes of the discussions, in terms of both the performance of the participants in maintaining the resource pool or supplying the public good and the participants’ own perceptions of such factors as their groups’ emergent norms, trust in one another’s adherence to those norms, and level of cooperativeness. There is room for both quantitative and qualitative content studies, taking advantage of the differing strengths of these complementary research methods. The main strength of quantitative methods for content analysis is the researcher’s ability to measure the most common types of interaction sequences and the amount of variation within and among these types. Quantitative data is also well suited for making strong inferences about the relationship between communication process and social dilemma outcomes. The main strength of qualitative methods, in contrast, is the detailed examination of the individual case. This is particularly useful for understanding what occurs during discussions in which groups do not reflect common types of interaction, and often leads to insights unavailable from past quantitative work that can encourage later researchers to broaden their research questions. No matter the method, the goal is to discover those communicative patterns that are both positively and negatively related to norm emergence, coordination of tactics, group identity formation, and optimum group performance in the game.

Although study of content and process in relatively simple social dilemma situations is in itself valuable, the study of more complicated situations may lead to further insight. The basic research paradigms for resource and public goods dilemmas allow for the manipulation of such factors as size of the personal advantage for cooperation, asymmetry among participants, and uncertainty in the size of a resource pool or the amount needed to be contributed to gain a public good. Studies using groups unable to communicate have shown that defection is more likely when it leads to better personal outcomes (reviewed in Sally, 1995); that asymmetry leads to the establishment of equality norms in some circumstances and equity norms in others (van Dijk, Wilke, Wilke, & Metman, 1999); and that uncertainty generally increases harvests from resource pools and decreases contributions to public goods (e.g., Gustafson, Biel, & Garling, 1999). There are apparently no published studies in which any of these manipulations have been used with research participants allowed to communicate, and thus no indication whether the findings just described would hold true with discussion. If opportunity to communicate does influence outcomes under these manipulations, then an examination of content may lead to an understanding of how that influence comes about.

An additional factor worthy of attention in communication scholarship is the effect of social value orientations toward conflict during social dilemmas. Schwartz and Bilsky (1987) define “values” as concepts or beliefs about a desirable end-state that transcend specific situations, guide the selection or evaluation of behavior and events, and are ordered by relative importance. The social value orientations found to be most relevant to behavior during social dilemmas are competitiveness, or the desire to gain greater outcomes than others; cooperativeness, or the desire for all participants to gain and share the best outcomes possible; and individualism, or attention to one’s own outcomes independently of others. Although they can be influenced by circumstance, most people possess a predominant social value orientation that is consistent over time and, as such, an aspect of personality. Research has shown social value orientation to affect cooperation rates both in experiments (reviewed in Komorita & Parks, 1996) and, to a lesser extent, in real life (Van Vugt, Meertens, & Van Lange, 1995). Research suggests that social value orientation does not interact with the opportunity to communicate (Kerr & Harris, 1996; Liebrand, 1984), suggesting that groups of cooperatives may communicate differently than groups of competitives or individualists. Content analytic studies are the best way to compare this suggestion with other possibilities.

Conclusion

Many of the most critical problems facing humanity, most notably those regarding resource shortages caused by overuse and failures to contribute to the common good, are examples of social dilemmas. Social scientists from a wide array of disciplines have performed relevant research and, in so doing, have provided us with some knowledge concerning what happens when people face a social dilemma and how they succeed or fail to manage it. The tendency for the opportunity to communicate to substantially increase cooperation rates has not only been one of the most often replicated findings, but also was found to be the most important of the factors known to influence cooperation in one meta-analysis (Sally, 1995). What is missing, however, is an understanding of the communication content and process associated with both success and failure at cooperation. It is here that communication scholarship can make a critical contribution to our knowledge of how to manage some of humanity’s most difficult social problems.

Anisha Shankar is a master’s degree candidate, and Charles Pavitt an associate professor, in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware. Part of this paper is based on the first author’s thesis, directed by the second author.

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[1] The well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma Game fits this definition and is actually the most basic example of a social dilemma. The social dilemmas we consider in this essay—resource and public goods dilemmas—can be technically defined as multi-person Prisoner’s Dilemmas.

[2] Because public goods experiments tend to last only one round, they are less representative of “real-life” dilemmas than are most resource dilemma studies.

Resource and Public Goods Dilemmas: A New Issue for Communication Research

Anisha Shankar

Charles Pavitt