Discuss rules and strategies to prevent free riding in group work and explain why it is important for individuals and society to live right. Discuss the positive impact that living right has on families, society, and individual self-actualization.
At some point in our lives, we’ve all had to do group work. Unlike individual assignments, group work is done by a group of people, so you can learn things that you can’t learn in an individual assignment. Working in groups teaches leadership, followership, and taking responsibility for your own work. The process of working with others also improves communication and conflict resolution skills. However, as the Prisoner’s Dilemma game shows, you can gain more when you don’t cooperate with your group. When you’re in a group like this, there are some people who want to do nothing and expect others to do it for them, the so-called free riders. So, let’s take a look at the strategies you can use to stop them and why it’s important to live a good life.
To prevent free riders, there are a few rules to follow. The first is to keep people in the same group for a semester or a year. Also, you should evaluate each other and remove them from the group if they do it more than a few times. The rationale behind these rules is the recurrence-reciprocity hypothesis. The repetition-reciprocity hypothesis states that people perform altruistic acts because they fear that the other person will retaliate next time, given that the interaction between them will continue. So, if you’re in a group for a semester or a year, it’s harder to be tempted to take a free ride for immediate gain because you have to maintain an ongoing relationship with your groupmates. Another form of retaliation is mutual evaluation. By evaluating each other on an hourly basis, you can weed out the people who are trying to get a free ride, and you can also reward those who are more engaged to further encourage participation.
What happens when we all decide to free ride in groups? Not only in groups, but as members of society, if we don’t fulfill our responsibilities and pass them off to others for our own convenience, our society will eventually be doomed. Therefore, we must live the right life, fulfilling our responsibilities without harming others.
Living right ultimately helps an individual survive. Living right can mean many things, but let’s think of it as living without harming others. As the reciprocity hypothesis states, if you don’t harm others, they won’t harm you. In 1984, Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan conspired to design a strategy that would yield the highest payoff in a prisoner’s dilemma game. The submissions ranged from highly sophisticated strategies designed to continually revise their predictions in a Bayesian fashion to randomized strategies that chose their actions at random each time. But the winning strategy was the simplest: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: start the game with cooperation and then copy your opponent’s previous actions. If your opponent cooperated in the previous game, you cooperate in this game, and if your opponent betrayed in the previous game, you betray in this game. In addition to these game strategies, reciprocity can also be observed in the world of vampire bats and chimpanzees. When vampire bats share their blood with other bats or chimpanzees groom each other’s fur, it is based on the principle: “I am willing to help others only if they have helped me.” Therefore, if I want to live without being harmed by others, I must live with minimal harm to others.
Let’s look at the meaning of living rightly in terms of family and kinship. What does it mean to live rightly in this context? It means fulfilling one’s role. Parents must fulfill their roles as parents, and children must fulfill their roles as children, so that the family community can be maintained. Parents need to take care of their children and take care of them, and children need to be filial to their parents and build a harmonious family. If they don’t fulfill their roles, the family may disintegrate. The kin selection hypothesis explains that altruistic behavior arises in families to increase the survival rate of genes. So, if each member doesn’t do their part, neither the parents nor the children will be able to live a smooth life, which in turn threatens the survival of the genes. In this way, if you don’t fulfill your responsibilities in your own family, you can jeopardize not only your own survival, but also the survival of your genes.
Living right extends from the individual to society. Living right helps maintain the stability of society. What would happen if everyone was selfish and looked out for their own interests? Imagine a world where no one had a bent arm. In a village of people who help others, instead of scrambling to get food for themselves with their unbendable arms, everyone puts food in each other’s mouths so that everyone can eat. However, in a village of selfish people, everyone puts food in front of themselves and tries to eat it with their unbendable arms, but in the end, they can’t eat the food and go hungry. In this way, if everyone looks out for their own interests, the society will go down a path of degeneration and eventually collapse. The complacency of thinking that it’s okay to be selfish can eventually affect the entire society. Therefore, instead of living a selfish life, we should live a righteous life that helps and cares for others.
Some may question whether it is necessary to sacrifice one’s own interests to live a good life. It’s true that taking a seat on the subway so you can sit more comfortably, or throwing tissues on the ground when you can’t be bothered to walk to a trash can that’s far away, is a short-term benefit to yourself. But if you think about it, what would happen to our society if everyone did these things for their own little convenience? Our society can be likened to a doughnut: it’s interconnected, and one person’s selfish behavior can have a huge ripple effect on the entire society. When someone in a position of power abuses their power or commits corruption, the repercussions are enormous. One person’s misbehavior can affect many people. Because society is so interconnected, it’s important to live right because your misbehavior can affect others.
Finally, living right ultimately helps individuals realize their own self-realization. In movies and dramas, we see people sacrificing themselves to save their teammates. In fact, when a gas explosion occurred in Busan in 2006, firefighter Seo Byung-gil saved two residents and was crushed to death by a pile of buildings. Why are these people willing to sacrifice themselves to save others? They made decisions and acted according to their own ideas in an emergency. They considered the pursuit of righteousness to be their highest value. They achieved self-actualization by upholding their beliefs about living right. Maslow divided human needs into five levels. Physiological needs, safety needs, affection and empathy needs, esteem needs, and finally self-actualization needs. As such, we can say that humans ultimately live for self-actualization. Through self-actualization, we will ultimately achieve happiness. Those who deceive their conscience for the convenience of the moment will only cause themselves guilt and suffering. On the other hand, those who live their lives right will ultimately live a happy and meaningful life, even if it is difficult and challenging in the moment.
Those who try to get a free ride will be criticized by their teammates, and in the end, they won’t have a good impact on their own lives. A selfish life may be sweet in the moment, but in the long run it can be very upsetting. On the other hand, a righteous life may be difficult in the moment, but in the end, it bears sweet fruits. Therefore, we should look ahead and live rightly rather than chasing immediate benefits.
