Environmental Problems as Social Dilemmas: Social, Temporal and Biospheric Dimensions

Sponsored by CEREO

Jeff Joireman, PhD
Associate Professor, Marketing,  WSU-Pullman

Wednesday February 18rd, 2-3 pm,  ETRL 101

Many environmental problems can be framed as social dilemmas. The classic social dilemma model for environmental problems has been based on Garret Hardin’s (1968) “Tragedy of the Commons.” This social dilemma frames environmental problems as a “social conflict” between self-interest and collective interests. Subsequent conceptualizations have emphasized that many real-world social dilemmas involve additional “temporal” and “biospheric” conflicts. From this view, environmental social dilemmas can be framed as situations in which short-term self-interests of humans is at odds with the long-term interests of society and the biosphere (Khachatryan, Joireman, & Casavant, 2013). This talk will review the concept of environmental social dilemmas, and review research focusing largely on how environmental decisions are shaped by temporal concerns (e.g., individual differences in consideration of present vs. future consequences; Strathman, Gleicher, Boninger, & Edwards, 1994; Joireman, Shaffer, Balliet, & Strathman, 2012).