Overuse and damage to natural resources from inappropriate visitor behavior is a type of social dilemmas faced by many recreation areas. Social dilemmas in natural recreation resource management are the conflict between the individual`s own benefit an...
Overuse and damage to natural resources from inappropriate visitor behavior is a type of social dilemmas faced by many recreation areas. Social dilemmas in natural recreation resource management are the conflict between the individual`s own benefit and that of the collectivity. Social dilemmas may be defined by two properties : (1) Each individual in a group receives a higher payoff for a socially defecting choice than for a cooperative choice, regardless of others` choices, and (2) each individual receives a higher payoff if all group members cooperate than if all defect. There are two approaches to solve the social dilemmas in National Parks, the structural solutions and the individual solutions. Establishment of superordinate authority, selective incentives, and privatization of common resources are included in the structural approaches, while face-to-face interaction and communication among group members in the individual approaches. To aid in generalizing from specific results to other situation, data from laboratory and field experiments are interpreted in the light of social dilemma theory.