How We Can Promote Behavior That Serves All of Us in the Future

The health and vitality of relationships, groups, and society at large is strongly challenged by social dilemmas or conflicts between short-term self-interest and long-term collective interest. Pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflict can be characterized as examples of urgent social dilemmas. This article advances a conceptual framework in which we analyze social dilemmas in terms of social and temporal concerns relevant to the social (individual vs. collective) and temporal (short-term vs. long-term) conflicts underlying social dilemmas. We discuss the plasticity of social orientations (altruism, cooperation, egalitarianism, individualism, competition, aggression) and temporal orientations (short-term orientation, future orientation), and illustrate their “logical effects” and “paradoxical effects” on behavior that supports collectively desired outcomes. This analysis enables us to suggest a set of novel recommendations for policy and intervention to help solve various social dilemmas in contemporary society.