This blog post explores methods to prevent free-riding and the reasons for living rightly, applying lessons from group assignments to life.
Searching for ‘group projects’ brings up the video ‘The Brutal History of Group Projects’ from the TV comedy show ‘SNL (Saturday Night Live)’ as the top related search term. This video depicts a group leader struggling to complete a group assignment. Additionally, in the drama ‘Cheese in the Trap,’ based on the popular webtoon of the same name and set in college life, an episode featuring senior Sang-chul causing trouble during a group project is a major plot point. College life is a microcosm of society before entering the workforce, a place where you meet diverse people. Group projects, in particular, often provide ample opportunity to encounter various, sometimes peculiar, and perhaps even strange individuals. In group projects, you’ll inevitably encounter free riders who, every time a meeting is scheduled, claim their parents are sick, their phone is broken, or some other inexplicable excuse arises. Group projects are assignments where all members share the workload to create a single, completed piece of work for a shared grade. However, free riders, knowing the project will be completed, aim only to have their name added to the finished work without contributing any effort themselves. But is there a reason we shouldn’t free-ride in group assignments? If we view group assignments as a microcosm of life, is there fundamentally a reason we shouldn’t free-ride and should live rightly in our lives?
Right action can be defined as behavior that benefits others, even if it doesn’t benefit oneself. If it benefits both me and the other person, there would be no need to hesitate. The key point is altruistic actions that benefit others but not oneself. Here, we can consider two types of benefits. One is short-term, direct, and material; the other is long-term, indirect, and psychological or moral. We can call the former active benefits and the latter passive benefits. The altruistic actions we considered that don’t benefit ourselves typically fall into the category of not bringing active benefits. However, such altruistic actions can still bring passive benefits. Therefore, while one might argue that there’s no need to act rightly because it doesn’t bring active benefits to me, I believe there is a reason to live rightly because it brings passive benefits.
Before discussing the reasons for living rightly, let’s first consider why free riders emerge in group assignments and how to prevent them. In group assignments, the way for all members to achieve good results is for everyone to participate diligently. However, from my perspective, free riding is advantageous regardless of whether others work hard or not. If others don’t work hard, refusing to free-ride means I alone must bear all the effort. In other words, free-riding becomes a dominant strategy in the group project game. Therefore, an economically rational individual would choose free-riding as the optimal strategy to complete this type of public good, the group project. So, let’s consider ways to prevent free-riding for the sake of the many college students suffering through group projects. Preventing free-riding is fundamentally about eliminating the incentive to act unfairly. Therefore, we devise methods to minimize the active benefits gained from free-riding and maximize the passive benefits gained from not free-riding.
Classes involving group projects typically last a semester, or four months. During this period, instead of creating altruistic individuals, we consider methods to induce behavior that appears altruistic. According to the book ‘The Emergence of Altruistic Humans’, one hypothesis regarding the emergence of altruistic humans is the ‘Repetition-Reciprocity Hypothesis’. This hypothesis explains that humans engage in altruistic behavior even at their own expense because they expect the game to continue and anticipate future rewards for their altruism. For this hypothesis to hold, there must be a belief that the relationship with the other party will persist. In group assignments, students should be kept unaware of when the group work will end. Therefore, one approach is for the professor not to announce the number of group assignments in advance. Additionally, since the effect of reward or retaliation for one’s actions diminishes as the number of group members increases, group size should be limited to three or four members. Let’s assume all group members want good grades.
Under this basic assumption, the method I devised to prevent free-riding is to make free-riding affect one’s personal grade. However, the professor likely assigned group projects because they wanted members to collaborate and produce results. Therefore, the group project itself is not graded individually. Instead, an additional individual assignment is given after the group project. This individual assignment is designed to be manageable and requires assistance from group members. For example, it could require the results of a simple survey conducted by a group member. Whether a group member chooses to help is entirely up to them, based on their own assessment of each member’s contribution during the previous group project. This way, group members who actively participated in the group assignment can receive significant help from others on the next individual assignment, earning extra credit. Conversely, free riders will struggle to achieve a good grade on their individual assignment. The results of this individual assignment are evaluated meaningfully by the professor. Therefore, the penalties for low participation in group assignments are defined as ‘the professor becoming aware’ and ‘a low grade on the individual assignment’. Going further, we add a penalty that is also severe for those who are not highly sensitive to grades. Human relationships significantly impact most people. We leverage this by affecting individual reputation. Individual assignment scores are posted on an online site or in a space accessible to all students, revealing how actively one participated in the group assignment. Those who did not receive help from group members on their individual assignment will be known to others as having attempted to free-ride. When entering a public space to view their own scores, individuals might remember others, particularly those with exceptionally high or low scores. Free riders seek to minimize effort while claiming credit for others’ work, but they likely don’t want this known outside their group. This is how I devised a method to prevent free riding in group assignments using the ‘Repetition-Reciprocity Hypothesis’. So how should we handle free-riding in life’s many problems, not just group assignments? Can it be prevented? Returning to the core question: is there fundamentally a reason we shouldn’t free-ride in life?
I believe there is a clear reason we should live rightly. We must live rightly. Thinking about whether there is a reason not to free-ride in society, or more broadly, to live rightly, is slightly different from group assignments. A group assignment lasts only four months, but life stretches on indefinitely. The world is not a group assignment, and it is certainly not a game decided by numbers. Diverse situations exist, and our initial assumptions may not hold true. Therefore, for the group assignment, we could only consider long-term benefits among passive gains. But real life is more complex, involving not just long-term benefits but various other passive benefits.
First, as seen in the free-riding prevention method for group assignments mentioned earlier, we can consider long-term benefits. Human relationships in life aren’t just about meeting for a game and playing together. No matter how we meet, no one knows when we’ll meet again next time. In other words, it’s a game with high repetition potential and unpredictability. Therefore, I cannot know how my actions today will affect me next time. In life, with its many variables, showing kindness to others can be closely linked to my future benefit and ultimately seen as a path for my own sake. This might feel less like truly altruistic behavior and more like behavior that appears altruistic. Yet, the long-term benefits that altruistic actions bring are also one reason to live rightly.
Second, humans are social creatures. As we considered in the game, we don’t live solely by weighing gains and losses; sometimes, we endure losses to live in harmony with others. People live alongside others, and in today’s globalized world—bound together by rapid transportation and ever-faster internet thanks to scientific and technological progress—it’s difficult to think only of one’s own life while excluding relationships with others. Moreover, human relationships are not solely built on material give-and-take; the emotions we feel for each other and the shared mental bonds also play a significant role. We engage in non-economic, altruistic behavior not just to gain direct benefit from someone, but because we share a substantial part of our emotions with them and want to understand them. Such altruistic actions may seem inefficient in the short term, but they are understandable within relationships I value. The benefits gained from relationships are themselves one of the indirect advantages of altruistic behavior. As mentioned earlier, since relationships constitute a major part of life, these actions don’t end with my own gain but can continue to unfold.
Third, our society has laws and regulations, culture and customs, and the resulting social condemnation. ‘The Emergence of Altruistic Humans’ describes such behavior as retaliation, achieved through socially agreed-upon laws and regulations. According to this book, people treat others differently or show varying degrees of tolerance depending on the culture and customs of the society they belong to. People must live correctly according to these norms to avoid violating the laws, regulations, culture, and customs of their society. In other words, there is a reason to live correctly to avoid suffering harm.
Finally, humans are not computers or robots; they are beings who communicate and possess strong reciprocity. Humans have self-esteem, a moral sense, and self-satisfaction. This can manifest through altruistic behavior. When I asked my father, “Is there a reason to live rightly?” he answered without hesitation that there is. He said it is because he wants to leave his name in history without fear, and also because he hopes his life will serve as a beacon for his beloved children or future generations. Finally, he cited self-respect as a reason, comparing it to living a life of wrongdoing. None of these three reasons directly translate to immediate benefit or convenience in life. Yet humans derive self-respect and self-satisfaction from altruistic actions, providing motivation as powerful as material gain. Watching my father live his life, I too came to believe that living rightly is the right thing to do. Such reasons clearly exist, and my own children will likely see me and conclude that living rightly is the right thing to do. For me, the reason is my father’s life, spent thinking of those weaker than himself and living rightly. While this is an intensely personal reason, I believe such individuals come together to form a society. These moral and psychological benefits—these spiritual benefits—also constitute reasons to live rightly.
People might look at altruistic individuals and think, “They live like fools.” Most people constantly feel they’re at a disadvantage, and in a society like today’s, saturated with individualism, considering others might seem inefficient and foolish. Living rightly might even be dismissed as an outdated phrase confined to morality textbooks. Yet, clear reasons exist for why we should live rightly. As mentioned earlier, first, unlike games, we can never know the world’s end, and predicting future events is far more difficult. There is reason to act altruistically even for the sake of our future selves. Second, human relationships occupy a large part of people’s lives, and altruistic behavior is inevitable in relationships built through empathy with others. Third, the society we live in has laws, regulations, culture, and customs. It’s difficult to commit illegal acts that these prohibit, risking social condemnation. Finally, humans are not robots; we are beings with self-esteem. For a deeply personal reason, just as my father did, I too have a reason to live in a way that brings me no shame. Living rightly means giving up a little of the profit people easily think of—material or short-term gain. Yet I believe passive benefits hold just as much value in our lives as active ones. In my life, whose end I cannot foresee, I will keep these reasons close to my heart. I will live without shame, perhaps economically inefficient and inefficient, yet foolishly nonetheless.