To determine if overuse of a common resource pool in a social trap was associated with the consumers' failure to give sufficient cognitive weighting to the importance of the long-term consequences of their actions, using a simulated social trap, groups of subjects played a resource management game of 15 or 40 rounds in which the value of the long-term consequence was to be multiplied by one of four weighting factors (0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0). The data were consistent with the hypothesis. Implications of this cognitive approach to research on social traps were discussed.
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