A secret peer review system and communication through leaders can be effective ways to prevent free riding in group work, which promotes individual cooperation and morality.
Nowadays, colleges and universities as well as high schools often use group work to encourage students to cooperate and collaborate. Group work is an important opportunity to achieve academic goals while learning teamwork skills that students will experience in real life. However, many students struggle with the problem of “free riders”. While group work is all about working together to complete a task, free-riders are the ones who don’t participate in group work because they think, “If I don’t do it, they’ll do it,” and they’re doing a lot of damage to the group. So, what are some ways to stop free riders?
The first is a secret peer review system. This is literally an ongoing evaluation system where no one can see each other’s evaluation results. The existence of the secret peer review system would be known before the project starts, which would prevent free riding to some extent. The results of the peer review system would then be added to some of the individual evaluations in the actual team project evaluation to differentiate the level of participation among individuals. This can be found in the retaliation-reciprocity hypothesis from the book The Emergence of Altruism.
The retaliation-reciprocity hypothesis is one of the hypotheses behind the evolution of altruism in humans, which states that humans retaliate altruistically for altruistic acts and selfishly for selfish acts, i.e., a selfish act of “free ride” in a secretive peer review system can be equally selfishly repaid with an equally selfish act of “secret evaluation”.
However, this retaliation-reciprocity hypothesis requires one premise. It is the continuation of the game. Here’s an example. In the United States, there is a culture of tipping. The main purpose of tipping is to make sure that the waiter remembers you the next time you come back to the restaurant, so that they can serve you better. So what is the behavior of many people who eat at a restaurant on their travels and leave a tip? Do they consider the possibility of coming back? The chances of that happening are very small. In other words, the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis says nothing about cooperative behavior that occurs in non-repeat situations. So the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis requires that the relationship continue into the future. In other words, even if there is a secret mutual evaluation system, some people may be tempted to try to get a free ride, thinking that they will never see the people they work with on a team project again, and that they will certainly not be evaluated in total by the evaluation system alone.
To compensate for this limitation, in order to keep the relationship (game) going, the project needs to be segmented, i.e., the project needs to be checked in the middle of the project to eliminate those who are found to be free riders in the secret peer review system. This way, you can give potential contributors a heads-up and increase their participation.
The second method involves voting to determine leadership roles and communicating the appropriate distribution of roles. I think that if you decide the leader through a fair vote within the group, and meet frequently around the leader to improve rapport and distribute roles appropriately, you can definitely increase the participation of people who want to ride for free. The rationale is based on the communication hypothesis in the book The Emergence of Altruism.
The communication hypothesis states that communication between people can prevent free-riders from choosing what might be the optimal response, i.e., individuals can be guided to collaboration by communication between team members, even though there is a free-riding option that maximizes their own self-interest. This is backed up by experiments that show that face-to-face communication is incredibly influential. This communication is not only important for the success of the project, but also for building trust and bonds between team members. This hypothesis leads me to believe that free-riding can be prevented to some extent if the leader actively promotes and encourages team members to meet in order to get to know each other better during team projects.
I have proposed two ways to prevent free riding. These are principles that can be applied not only to academics, but also to social life in general. Based on this, I will discuss “Why should humans live right?”. Before we talk about why we should live right, let’s talk about self-interest in the narrow and broad sense. Narrow self-interest is short-term and pragmatic, while broad self-interest is long-term and spiritual.
Let’s start by discussing the retaliation-reciprocity hypothesis, which is the rationale behind the secret mutual evaluation system. Humans live in society and interact with each other through relationships. Just as we are naturally born with a parent-child relationship, we have many different relationships with different people, including lovers, friends, parents, and the list goes on. While there may be many good relationships in our lives, there will be at least one relationship with which we have clashed, fought, or otherwise had a bad experience. In other words, according to the retaliation-reciprocity hypothesis, after a clash or conflict, retaliation and another selfish act may be triggered, and both may suffer material and psychological harm. Therefore, by living rightly, we try to prevent such harm in the future, maintain altruistic relationships, and pursue our own happiness. In the end, this is a narrow definition of utilitarianism, which gives us a reason to live right, but not a justification for living right.
The communication hypothesis overcomes this limitation of the imperative to live rightly. The communication hypothesis suggests that humans can choose to cooperate with each other instead of “free riding,” which could be a more self-interested response. As mentioned earlier, humans live in a society with multiple relationships, and within this society, they maintain or develop relationships through numerous conversations and encounters. In other words, as social animals, we don’t need a reason to live correctly. They need relationships and interactions with people to be happy and to lead their lives, and this leads to a lot of communication. And people choose to cooperate with each other according to the communication hypothesis. According to the communication hypothesis, the rightness of human behavior is simply a consequence of human nature and morality, which explains the imperative to live right.
In other words, efforts to prevent free riding in group work are not just about academic achievement, but also play an important role in promoting cooperation and mutual trust in our society as a whole. It also answers the fundamental question of why humans should live right.
