Generosity and Selfishness in Small Groups: Dealing with the Free Rider Problem

More thoughts inspired by Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age…

In Chapter 4 (“Opportunity”) Shirky describes some of the research on the Ultimatum Game. This simple game involves two players, a “proposer” and a “responder.”  The proposer is given some amount of money, say, 10 dollars. She decided how much to keep and how much to give to the responder. She proposes this arrangement to the responder, who can then either accept it (so that each player gets the money as per the proposal) or reject it, in which case no one gets any money.

You might expect the proposer to maximize her winnings from the game by offering the responder only one dollar and keeping the other nine for herself. And you might expect the responder to accept this since one dollar is still free money. However, research shows that proposers tend to be a little more generous than that, usually offering the responder four or five dollars instead of just one. And when a proposer offers only a buck or two, the responder usually rejects the deal. Variations on the game (more money, more anonymity between the proposer and the responder, and so on) show the same general trends–people are less selfish and more generous than you might think.

Why? Shirky points toward the social implications of offering someone a bad deal. With people we know and with whom we interact regularly, we’re not likely to offer them a bad deal and if they offer us a bad deal, we’re likely to refuse it as a sort of social punishment. Shirky writes, “In the Ultimatum Game, people behave as if their relationship matters, even if they are told it doesn’t, even if they are assured it doesn’t, even if they only have a single interaction with an unknown partner.” As a result, players tend to be generous and not selfish.

Moving from the experimental to the observational, Shirky describes some of the work of economist Elinor Ostrom, who has studied how groups of people manage common property, such as farmers and fishermen who have to share physical resources like rivers. In these settings, if someone acts too selfishly and uses too much of a common resource, everyone else in the group suffers. What Ostrom has found is that when groups like these are allowed to govern themselves, they tend to behave in generous ways, just like players in the Ultimatum Game. In fact, her research indicates that self-management, in some case, works better than external management through government or market interventions.

What implications do these findings have for group work in a college or university course? One reason instructors are often hesitant to assign in-class or out-of-class group is the free rider problem. What if you have a group member who doesn’t contribute to the group effort but is rewarded the same as everyone else in the group? The research Shirky describes indicates that free riders should be relative rare, that students in a self-managed small group should be on the whole more generous with each other than selfish. Why then worry about free riders? Why implement group work policies designed to punish free riders when small groups should be able to manage themselves?

Ostrum’s research gives some clues. She identifies a few key ingredients present in groups that manage themselves well.

“Mutually visible action among the participants” – Shirky doesn’t offer many details on any of these ingredients, but I can imagine that if group members are able to operate in secret (like a fisherman who takes more than his share of the fish in a river under the cover of darkness) then they can’t be held accountable for actions that hurt the group. It’s my experience that groups of students working together on projects have a pretty good sense of who’s contributing what to the group effort, so I don’t see this is a big problem. Perhaps it’s a good idea, however, to give students tools by which they can see each others’ contributions more explicitly, particularly when they’re not together face-to-face. For instance, you might have students use a wiki to gather and organize their project notes, since most wikis will track and make visible when and how users contribute.

“Credible commitment to the shared goals” – This, I think, is the kicker. What kind of shared goals does a group of students working on a project have? Might they all want to achieve a certain grade on the project? Perhaps, but if you have some students gunning for an A and one student fine with a B, that’s not really a shared goal. And getting a good grade isn’t a particularly powerful motivation, not compared to the intrinsic desires to be autonomous and competent and to connect and share. What if students all wanted to learn something in particular (some area of knowledge or a set of skills) or to accomplish something meaningful? Those might be stronger motivations, but how can an instructor encourage those kinds of goals?

Here’s one example from YouTube celebrity (and Kansas State anthropology professor) Michael Wesch: a course on digital ethnography, organized more like a research group than a class, in which students spend the first three weeks exploring the field so as to develop an overarching research question for the course. Wesch has set the course up to tap into those intrinsic motivations I just mentioned in significant ways. I suspect that his students indeed have a “credible commitment to the shared goals” that they themselves helped develop. Unfortunately, this example suffers from what I find to be typical of Michael Wesch’s teaching innovations–it’s clear that it works well in his courses but it’s not so clear how the ideas would transfer to other teaching contexts.

“Group members’ ability to punish infractions” – Shirky seems to indicate that this element isn’t as critical if the other two elements are in place. He writes, “The easiest infraction to deal with is the one that doesn’t happen, so having members internalize a sense of right and wrong when dealing with irrigation or fishing rights becomes an essential tool.” In the context of, say, shepherds sharing grazing land for their flocks, one shepherd who overgrazes can suffer penalties both social (being shunned or ridiculed by the other shepherds) and economic (being shut out from access to the shared land). The social consequences of being a free rider are enough to discourage many students from letting their groups down, but not in all cases. That’s why, perhaps, it’s advisable to set up group work so that groups can also impose “economic” punishments on free riders. Some instructors do this by having a portion of each student’s grade determined by peer evaluation, so that a free rider will get dinged by his peers in the group.

I think I’ve heard of some instructors going one step beyond this by letting groups kick out members who don’t carry their weight. This seems a better match to the “Don’t bring your flocks around here anymore!” punishment. A free rider who is kicked out of his group no longer has access to the shared resource in question–the knowledge, skills, and hard work of the group members. I can see this “nuclear solution” working, I think. A group member would really have to be dragging down the group to be kicked out, since kicking a member out leaves the remainder of the group with fewer people and thus fewer resources. Presumably, the ejected student would still be able to submit an assignment, but he wouldn’t have access to peers for assistance–he would have to complete the work all on his own. This would be a strong motivation for students to contribute in useful ways.

I was glad to read Shirky’s summary of research indicating people tend to be more generous than we think. As an optimist (if not an idealist), that warms my heart. I hope it balances some of the skepticism I sometimes see from instructors regarding group work and the threat of free riders. I’m encouraging to set up a few simple mechanisms by which student groups can manage themselves, then trust them to do so well.

What’s your experience with the free rider problem? How do you encourage your students to establish meaningful shared goals when starting group projects? What kind of tools do you give students to manage themselves?

Image: “Battling Fuel Prices” by Flickr user Brian Auer, Creative Commons licensed