ABSTRACT
Social dilemma research is of interest to a variety of scientists besides psychologists, primarily because social dilemmas are adaptable to many situations. The journal is truly interdisciplinary; the editorial board consists of economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, as well as psychologists. This chapter examines work in political science, finance, and biology. It examines how research is conducted, and presents some of the major research findings. Researchers interested in political issues often rely on a prisoner’s dilemma framework to study and theorize about such issues. Comparison of the arms race to a social dilemma has its roots in the early 1960s, when a series of books by Charles Osgood, Anatol Rapoport, and Thomas Schelling argued that the then-young race to acquire nuclear weapons could easily be described as a prisoner’s dilemma. R. Jervis has proposed a Prisoner’s dilemma variant called the security dilemma.
