In this article, we’ll discuss how individualized assessments, the role of the moderator, and peer review can be used to prevent free riding in college group activities, and whether they can ensure fairness and active participation.
At some point in your college career, you’re bound to encounter group work. Through the experience of several group activities, college students realize why communism has not succeeded in the real world. When a group of people work together on a task and everyone in the group receives the same grade based on the group’s performance, individuals may think, “If I’m a little dishonest, someone else will do it for me.” This is because others have to work harder to produce a good result. This leads to a free-rider phenomenon where people who don’t work hard get good grades while others work hard and produce good results. This ultimately defeats the purpose of group work, and the selfish behavior of individuals hurts the entire team.
In fact, group work in college is not just about academic achievement. In the process, students develop the skills of cooperation, responsibility, and communication that are essential in social life. These experiences will help them later in life when they face similar challenges at work or in their social circles. Therefore, the success of a group activity is about more than just a grade.
In this article, we will discuss how to prevent free-riding to ensure the best possible group experience, utilizing the hypotheses outlined in The Emergence of Altruism to argue that there is a reason to live right.
First, in order to prevent free riding, we need to add an individual evaluation to the group, rather than just giving everyone the same score. Without individual evaluations, people can feel like they’re getting a free ride because they’re scored based on the group’s output, regardless of their own contribution. Therefore, including individual evaluations prevents free riding in the first place and encourages individuals to actively participate in group activities in order to do well on their individual evaluations. The “costly signaling hypothesis,” introduced in The Emergence of Altruism, explains that people signal altruistic behavior to the group to demonstrate their competence in order to receive rewards. As a result, members will want to participate in activities to increase their contribution and receive higher individual evaluations.
The question now becomes, “How do we do this?” Unless it’s something that can be counted, like how many bricks were laid, everyone’s contribution to the group activity is different and important, and it’s hard to express it on an accurate scale. It would be ideal if the professor who assigns the final score could observe and judge all the activities and assign the score, but in reality, it is not possible for the professor to participate and observe all the activities of each group. Therefore, the professor needs a proxy to observe the group on their behalf, which can be realized through a moderator.
Now, let’s think about the role of the moderator. First of all, even if you simply let the facilitator observe and evaluate the group, there is a possibility that the facilitator is also a free rider. Therefore, the professor should grade the group based on the group’s overall output. This way, the group leader will be motivated to lead the group to the best possible outcome and will naturally be more engaged, removing the incentive for the leader to free ride.
The role of the captain is very important in group activities. He or she is not just the leader of the group, but is responsible for evaluating the group’s performance and the contributions of each member. He or she must show leadership by guiding the group to maximize the group’s performance, identifying each member’s strengths, and distributing tasks appropriately. Under their leadership, members are expected to fulfill their roles and responsibilities and work together as a team to achieve the best results. This structure naturally reduces the possibility of free riding and fulfills the purpose of the group activity.
The group members now know that the group leader is going to work hard, and they’re motivated to follow suit. This can be solved by having the professor assign a total score to the group’s output, and then the group leader distributes the points based on each member’s contribution. This will encourage each member to be more engaged in the activity and make a concerted effort to get as many points as possible for the group as a whole. It will also encourage altruistic and active participation in order to get as many points as possible, in line with the costly signaling hypothesis mentioned earlier.
However, since the group leader may be biased or unobjective in distributing points to the group, the group members evaluate each other’s activities and the professor determines the final score based on the points assigned by the group leader and the group members’ mutual evaluation. Like the prisoner’s dilemma where two suspects in a case are being interrogated and their sentences are determined by their silence/confession, if you make a choice once and it’s over, you can take advantage of your selfish choice. However, the repetition-reciprocity hypothesis states that in situations where individuals repeatedly make choices and face each other, they will make altruistic choices. After the group activity is over, when there is no more interaction and there is a situation of mutual evaluation, it is expected that each member will behave altruistically, and each member will actively participate in the group activity instead of taking a free ride.
Finally, there are cases where a group member may receive a low evaluation due to the relationship between group members, even though he/she has contributed significantly to the group activity, so a remedy should be provided to the professor to disagree with the score and evaluation given by the group leader. This is an important mechanism to ensure that an individual’s contributions are objectively evaluated and to prevent unfair situations from occurring.
To prevent the incentive of free riding, groups should be given individual scores rather than group scores, and facilitators should be used to realize what professors cannot realistically observe for objective evaluation. By giving points based on the performance of the group, the group leader is encouraged to actively participate and lead, eliminating the case of free riding in reverse. Now, if the leader is able to assign the total points received by the group based on the contributions of the group members to prevent the leader from working hard and free-riding on the other members, the members will not be motivated to free-riding and will actively participate in the activity to get the most points. To ensure that the scores are objective and in line with the professor’s intentions, the group members evaluate each other, and the professor sets the final score by comparing it to the score assigned by the group leader. Finally, to prevent members from undervaluing their contributions to the activity due to their relationships with each other, they can appeal to the professor. This method removes the incentive for free riding for all members, including the group leader. This creates an environment where all members, including the group leader, are encouraged to actively participate in group activities, because hard work is the best way to get a good individual evaluation.
Group activities can also be seen as a small society. However, due to its short duration, it is economically beneficial to engage in selfish behaviors such as free rides when others are engaging in altruistic behaviors, and everyone will not actively participate in the group activity. Therefore, through the methods and rules presented above, an environment is created where everyone can participate in the group activity altruistically by overcoming the constraint of finite duration using repetitive and interactive actions.
The real world is more complex and diverse. Some interactions are ongoing, such as in a workplace or organization, while others are of varying durations, such as passing someone on the street and never seeing them again. In the former case, people naturally act altruistically towards each other. In the latter case, the interaction is long-lasting, and people are naturally inclined to act altruistically towards each other.
