Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a special issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology devoted to the topic of “Current Directions in Social Dilemmas Research”. Many of today's global challenges, such as climate change and health crises, have the structure of a social dilemma where individual interest conflict with collective goals. Whereas social dilemma research has a long tradition, with its foundation over six decades ago, the field is changing and recently focusing on new directions.

This special issue aims to provide a compilation of new directions, mainly in quasi-experimental and experimental social dilemma research, potentially including one or two review articles. Specifically, it can consist of

a) experimental studies on social dilemmas across national borders,

b) experimental studies that address behavior in real-world social dilemmas such as climate change or health crises,

c) experimental (replication) studies on social dilemma behavior with samples from underrepresented societies,

d) studies using new technologies (e.g., AI, VR) to understand further the antecedents and consequences of social dilemma behaviors.

We invite authors to submit the manuscript by 30 November 2025. More details can be found via this link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/320033/current-directions-in-social-dilemmas-research

Feel free to send questions to angela.dorrough@fernuni-hagen.de.

Best,

Guest Editors

Angela Dorrough (FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany)
Angelo Romano (Leiden University, the Netherlands)
Giuliana Spadaro (VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Shuxian Jin (University of Sussex, the United Kingdom)