Social Traps in Second Life

Social traps are examples of social dilemma situations, where an individual acts for personal advantage that is damaging the group as a whole. Traps can be avoided, nevertheless, by the proper cooperation between the group members. A laboratory analog of social traps was implemented by Brechner in the 1970´s. We built a a Second Life analog for Brechner´s experiment to explore social traps and how coordination takes place in a 3D virtual world. While some of the groups that were not allowed to communicate succeeded in avoiding the trap, communication had a significant effect on how the participants regulated their resource. We observed very similar response patterns compared to the original experiment. That, in turn, shows a great potential for using virtual worlds as collaborative tools. We also analyzed the social traps experiment using game theory and the results of the experiments match the game theory predictions.