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Definition
An action that can increase an individual’s payoff but that results in a socially inefficient outcome.
Introduction
In social interactions, there is often a conflict between what is immediately good for the individual as opposed to what is good for the group of interacting individuals as a whole. Such situations are known as social dilemmas (Dawes 1980) and arise because actions that immediately benefit one individual may nevertheless lead to inefficient outcomes. Consider trade or exchange, for example. Cooperation would involve fairly representing the goods being offered and honoring the terms of the exchange by, for example, not simply taking the goods of the other party by force and giving nothing in return. Defection, on the other hand, would involve misrepresenting the goods being offered or taking the goods of the other party by force. Although the total payoff to the pair of traders is maximized...
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References
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Powers, S.T. (2017). Defection. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1616-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1616-1
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