Tacit Coordination and Social Dilemmas: On the Importance of Self-Interest and Fairness

Situations in which people are socially interdependent are often characterized as mixed-motive situations. An important example of a mixed-motive situation is the social dilemma. In social dilemmas, personal and collective interests are at odds in the sense that (a) individual group members may obtain higher outcomes if they pursue their personal interest rather than the collective interest of the group, but (b) all group members are better off if they all pursue the collective interest rather than their personal interests (for overviews, see e.g., Komorita & Parks, 1995; Kopelman, Weber, & Messick, 2002).