This article explores the problem of free riding in group work and how to solve it, and furthermore, why we should live right in our lives. It discusses the importance of living right through long-term benefits, relationships, social norms, self-esteem, and more.
If you search for “group work,” the first thing that comes up is a video called “Group Work Atrocity,” created by the TV comedy program Saturday Night Live (SNL). The video depicts a group of students struggling to complete a group task. Also, in “Cheese in the Trap,” a drama set in college life based on the popular webtoon of the same name, the episode of Sang-chul, a senior, who is embarrassed by the group task, is the main event. College life is a small society before entering the real world, and it’s a place where you meet various people. In particular, there are many opportunities to meet various, sometimes unusual, and even strange people through group work. In group work, you’ll find free riders whose parents are sick, whose cell phones are broken, and whose excuses they can’t talk about at every meeting. Group assignments are tasks that require everyone in the group to share the work to create a single, finished product for a collective score. But free riders know that the work will be done, and they want to put their name on the finished product and not do any work. But why shouldn’t we be free riders in group work? If we look at group work as a microcosm of life, is there any reason why we shouldn’t fundamentally live our lives right and not take free rides?
Right behavior can be defined as behavior that benefits others, even if it doesn’t benefit you. If it’s good for me and good for the other person, I don’t have to think about it. What we want to focus on are altruistic behaviors that don’t benefit you but benefit others. We can think of two kinds of benefits here. One is short-term, direct, material benefits, and the other is long-term, indirect, psychological, and moral benefits. We can call the former active benefits and the latter passive benefits. Altruistic behaviors that don’t benefit us in the way we think they should usually don’t bring active benefits. However, these altruistic behaviors can also have passive benefits. So while you could argue that I don’t need to do right because it doesn’t actively benefit me, I believe that I have a reason to live right because it does have a passive benefit.
Before we discuss the reasons to live right, let’s first consider why free riders happen in groups and how to prevent them. First of all, the only way for everyone to win in a group is if everyone works hard. However, from my perspective, it’s an advantage to have a free rider whether or not the other person is working hard on the task. In other words, in the game of group work, free riding is a dominant strategy, because if my opponents don’t work hard, I have to do all the work. Therefore, an economic and rational human being would choose free riding as the best strategy to fulfill the public good of grouping. So, let’s think about how to prevent free riding for the many college students who suffer from group work. Preventing free riding is consistent with making it so that there is no reason to live incorrectly, so let’s devise a way to minimize the active benefit of free riding and maximize the passive benefit of not free riding.
The class in which the group work takes place usually lasts for a semester, or four months. During this time, instead of trying to create altruistic people, think about how to get people to behave in ways that appear altruistic. According to the book The Emergence of Altruism, there is one hypothesis about the emergence of altruism: the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis. This hypothesis explains that humans act altruistically, even to their own detriment, because they expect the game to continue and that their altruistic behavior will be reciprocated in the future. For this hypothesis to be true, there must be a belief that the relationship with the other person will continue. In group work, it’s important that students don’t know when the group work will end, so you might choose not to announce the number of group work sessions in advance. You should also limit the number of people in a group to three or four, because the more people in a group, the less effective the reward or retribution for their behavior. Let’s assume that everyone in the group wants to get a good grade.
Given this basic assumption, my idea of how to prevent free riding is to let it affect your own personal grade. However, your professor probably assigned the group assignment because he or she wants you to work together to produce a collaborative product, so you don’t personally grade the group assignment itself. Instead, you assign a separate individual assignment after the group assignment. This individual assignment is set up so that it’s not overwhelming and requires help from the group. For example, you can make it so that you need the results of a simple survey from your group. The decision to help or not is entirely up to you, based on your own judgment of each member’s contribution in the previous group assignment. This way, members who worked hard in the group assignment can get extra credit for the next individual assignment with lots of help from other members, and members who took a free ride won’t do well on the individual assignment. The results of this individual assignment are meaningfully evaluated by the professor, so the penalty for low participation in the group assignment is “the professor will know” and “a low grade on the individual assignment”. We take it a step further and add a fatal penalty for those who are not so sensitive to grades. Relationships play a big role in most people’s lives. Use it to influence a person’s reputation. Post individual assignment grades online or in a place where everyone in the class can see them, so they can see how active they were in the group work. People who don’t get help from their peers on individual assignments will let others know that they tried to get a free ride. You might remember other people who went into public places to see their scores, especially those with very high or low scores. The free-rider wants to save effort and take credit for someone else’s work, but doesn’t want it to be known outside the group. Using the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis, we’ve devised a way to stop free-riding on group work. But what about free-riding on life’s non-group work problems? Can we stop it? To get back to the original point, do we have a reason not to take free rides in life?
I think we definitely have a reason to live right. We should live right. Thinking about not taking free rides in society, or more broadly, whether we have a reason to live right, is a little different from the group task. Group work only lasts for four months, but life is long and never ends. The world is not a group, and it’s not a numbers game. There are many different situations and the assumptions we make may not apply. Real life is more complex, and there are many passive interests, not just long-term ones.
First, we can think about long-term interests, as evidenced by how to prevent free-riding in the aforementioned group task. Relationships in life aren’t just about meeting up for a game. No matter how you meet, you never know when you’ll meet again. In other words, it’s a highly repeatable and unpredictable game, so you never know how your actions will come back to haunt you next time. With so many variables in life, doing favors for others can be seen as a way to benefit yourself in the future. This may feel more like selflessness than altruism. However, the long-term benefits of altruistic behavior are one of the reasons to live right.
Second, humans are social animals. We don’t just live by the sum of our losses and gains, as we do in the game, but we live with others, sometimes to our detriment. People live with other people, and in today’s globalized world, where the world is connected by fast transportation and faster internet thanks to advances in science and technology, it’s hard to think about your life without thinking about your relationships with other people. In addition, human relationships are not just about the material benefits you exchange, but also about the emotions you feel and the mental things you share. There are also non-economic behaviors that are altruistic because I want to share a large part of my emotions with someone and understand them, not because I want to directly benefit them. These altruistic behaviors may be inefficient in the short term, but they are understandable within the context of a relationship that I value. Relationship benefits are one of the indirect benefits of altruistic behavior. As I said earlier, relationships are a big part of life, so this behavior doesn’t just stop at my own good, but can continue on and on.
Third, our society has laws and regulations, culture and customs, and social judgment. The Emergence of Altruism describes these behaviors as retaliation, which is achieved through socially agreed upon laws and regulations. According to the book, humans differ in the way they treat others and the degree of tolerance they extend to them based on the culture and customs of the society they live in. People have a reason to live up to the laws, regulations, culture, and customs of their societies in order to avoid breaking those norms-that is, to avoid being harmed.
Finally, humans are not computers or robots, but communicative and highly interactive beings. Humans have self-esteem, morality, and self-satisfaction. This can be manifested through altruistic behavior. When I asked my father the question, “Is there a reason to live right?”, he answered yes without hesitation. He said it’s because he wants to leave his name in history without fear, and because he wants his life to be a guidepost for his loved ones and future generations. Lastly, he said it was because of how he felt about himself compared to how he would have felt if he had done the wrong thing. All three of these reasons are not direct benefits or advantages to living. However, humans have a sense of self-esteem and self-satisfaction from altruistic behavior, which is as much of a motivator as material gain. I looked at the life my father lived and thought it was right to live right, and there are certainly reasons for that, and my children will look at me and think it’s right to live right, too. For me, it’s because my father has spent his life thinking about those weaker than himself and doing the right thing. These are very personal reasons, of course, but I believe that these individuals together constitute a society. These moral and psychological benefits, or spiritual benefits, are also reasons to live right.
People may look at altruistic people and think, “They’re living like fools.” Most people always lose, and in today’s highly individualistic society, they may think it’s inefficient and stupid to think about others. You might even think that living rightly is an archaic phrase that belongs only in moral books. However, there are good reasons to live right. First, unlike a game, we never know the end of the world, and it’s much harder to predict what will happen in the future. There are reasons to be altruistic, even for your future self. Second, relationships are a big part of people’s lives, and altruistic behavior is inevitable when it comes to empathizing with others. Third, the societies we live in have laws, regulations, cultures, and customs, and it’s hard to do illegal things that they consider taboo without risking social condemnation. Finally, humans are not robots, but beings with a sense of self-worth. For deeply personal reasons, I have a reason to live without shame, just as my father did. Living right means giving up some of the things that people think are easy, material or short-term gains. But I believe that passive gains are just as valuable in our lives as active gains. I will keep these reasons in mind for the rest of my life, which may end at any moment, and live unabashedly, perhaps uneconomically and inefficiently, but foolishly nonetheless.
