The unique biodiversity found within the highland forests of Madagascar is increasingly threatened by rapid clearing of forest for agriculture. Successful protection of the remaining biodiversity will require an understanding of the mechanisms motivating deforestation, and the ability to identify those individuals who are most likely to clear land in the future. We explored the social and economic charactersistics of households in villages around a recently established national park to identify which were most likely to clear forest. Data suggest that shifted cultivators are responsible for much of the recent deforestation but that they were actually more likely than residents to engage in sustainable practices. Further, basic economic models predict the mean behavior of households, but fail to account for the effect of inter-household heterogeneity in land use, resulting in large variance in household-level predictions. Results highlight the importance of considering such heterogeneities in modeling the potential for future land use change in the forests of Madagascar.