Social dilemma logic has provided an important paradigm for the laboratory study of how people respond to choice situations in which one option advances individual welfare but detracts from social welfare, and the research agenda based on this logic has been to discover circumstances that promote "cooperation. " Yet the power of various social dilemma metaphors may have turned experimentalists' attention from other members of a more general family in which cooperation's desirability is often more ambiguous and in which, therefore, the normative and ethical issues underlying the individual's choices are more difficult. We present a typology of 12 such "complex social dilemmas, " discussing, with examples, the behavioral, ethical, and experimental-design issues the different types raise.
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