Some reforms, such as the passing of a prohibitive law or a binding agreement to solve a social dilemma, involve coercion. In hypothetical cases, Ss sometimes said they would not support coerced reforms even though they acknowledged that the reforms would improve matters. Ss justified such resistance by noting that the reform would harm some group (despite helping many others), that a choice would be taken away that people ought to be able to make (i.e., that a right would be violated), or that the reform would produce an unfair distribution of costs or benefits. These results were found when Ss indicated whether each justification was true or false (and their responses were correlated with their voting), when they chose justifications from a list, or when they provided open-ended responses. Ss also exhibited a status quo effect: They were more likely to vote against a reform than to vote to repeal the same reform once it was passed. Reforms are social rules that improve matters on the whole. Examples of past reforms are the institution of motor-vehicle laws, the regulation of drags, the granting of rights to women and repressed minorities, the recent deregulation of markets in Communist countries, and, on a smaller scale, countless minor changes in rules and traditions within smaller institutions such as schools and businesses. Some reforms require little coercion: Those reforms that involve coordination (Luce & Raiffa, 1957; Ullmann-Margalit, 1977) require only that the change be made salient. For example, no law or coercion is required to ensure that telephone books and dictionaries put their entries in alphabetical order. In coordination, it is to the advantage of all to follow the rule. Other reforms that require little coercion are those that increase the options available to each person, as in the market reforms in the Communist world. Other reforms require some coercion. The classic cases are those that involve social dilemmas (Dawes, 1980; Schelling, 1978; also known as commons dilemmas [Hardin, 1968] or H-person prisoner's dilemmas [Luce & Raiffa, 1957]). In these cases, as we define them, each person is faced with a conflict between options: one that is better for the individual and one that is better for all of the members of the group in question. Examples of unsolved social dilemmas are those that result from excessive childbearing in some countries, cutting of trees for fuel, and production of gases that cause global warming. Many social dilemmas have been solved (sometimes only partially) by rules or laws that effectively make the selfish response