This article explains why humans are expected to follow rules and laws in society, and explores why selfish behaviors such as free riding in team tasks can lead to long-term disadvantages. It compares narrow short-term benefits to broader long-term benefits, emphasizing that free riding negatively impacts an individual’s social trust and growth.
Humans live in societies. We live with a variety of other people, so we create laws and rules for each other to follow so that we can live together without harming others. These laws and rules are an important foundation for society to function smoothly. If everyone prioritizes their own interests and ignores the laws and rules, society will fall into chaos, and the damage will eventually come back to bite them. However, there are some selfish people who don’t follow these laws and rules. But in the short term, selfish people seem to have more to gain. So why should we live right? We’ll explore the reasons why we should live right by describing a common team challenge we encounter and how to solve it.
Before we do that, let’s categorize the self-interest of an action into two types. First, self-interest in the narrow sense is the direct benefit of an action, which is a short-term benefit. The direct benefit of selfish behavior is the narrow benefit. The broader self-interest refers to the indirect benefits that accrue to you as a society from your actions. These are the long-term benefits.
From elementary school through college and beyond, we are evaluated on what we learn and assigned grades that correspond to our learning. In the educational process, grades are not just an indicator of an individual’s academic achievement, but also a significant factor in social trust and future opportunities. Some forms of assessment are based solely on individual effort, such as exams, while others are based on a group effort, such as team assignments, in which a group of people work together to produce a single deliverable. The purpose of a team assignment is to get people to work together to create something more than they could on their own. However, when you’re being judged on the outcome, you’re often judged on the outcome, not the process of doing the task. This is where free riders come in.
A free rider is someone who rides the bus and tries to take advantage of it without paying for it. In team assignments, a free rider is also someone who doesn’t contribute to the team’s work and just gets points. Complaints about free riders in team assignments can be heard in conversations between friends on Facebook or Instagram. If you search the internet for team assignments, most of the results are talking about free riders, which means there are a lot of them. In fact, this problem is not only common in academic communities, but also in workplaces, social organizations, and more. The behavior of individuals trying to share in the group’s achievements without doing their part can be a problem in any field. Free riding is a very selfish behavior, as it allows a person to receive the same amount of points as their teammates while not participating in the group activity. However, the lack of strong penalties for free riding is one of the reasons why it is still so prevalent.
The most basic way to stop free riding is to penalize it. If you’re working on a team assignment and you see a free rider, record the conversation or save the team assignment progress to create evidence. Submit the work and evidence to your professor so that the free-rider gets the lowest possible grade. By making the penalty for free riding strong, potential free riders will be more likely to participate in group activities because they’ll feel the pressure of the score. However, there’s one problem with this approach. If you have courses that don’t count for a grade, or courses where grades don’t matter much, you may have students who don’t care about their grades. These students are more likely to not participate in group activities because they don’t care about their grades. Punishing free riders only punishes self-interest in a narrow sense, so it won’t work for someone who doesn’t care about the team work.
To prevent free riding in this situation, we need to take a broader approach. If someone free-rides, their teammates will initially dislike them and evaluate them poorly. This will also spread to others, and the free-rider will be labeled as a selfish person who free-rides. This reputation doesn’t just affect the relationship in the moment, it’s a major obstacle to building social trust in the long run. This puts the free-rider at a huge disadvantage in any future activities, and they will have a hard time connecting with people socially, even outside of group activities. This is because the free-rider will avoid free-riding because they don’t want to cause harm to others.
In addition, in the long run, free-riding hinders your growth and development. You may be able to score comfortably in the short term, but it will eventually prevent you from building your skills and experience. Therefore, the most effective way to stop free riding is to convince the person who is about to free ride that their behavior will be detrimental to you in a broader sense. This can be very effective.
