This blog post explores individual assessment and the role of group leaders in university group activities to prevent free riding, proposing effective solutions.
During college life, students inevitably participate in group projects. Through repeated experiences with group work, university students come to understand firsthand why communism has failed in reality. When a group gathers to complete an assignment and all members receive the same grade based on the group’s final product, individuals may think, “Even if I slack off a bit, someone else will cover for me.” This leads to the free-rider phenomenon, where individuals who do not actively participate receive good grades while others work hard to produce quality results. Such situations ultimately undermine the purpose of group work, allowing individual selfish behavior to harm the entire team.
In fact, group work in college aims for more than just academic achievement. Through this process, students cultivate essential social skills like teamwork, responsibility, and communication abilities. These experiences will prove invaluable when facing similar challenges later in the workplace or within social communities. Therefore, the success of group activities holds significance beyond mere grades.
This article proposes a solution to prevent free-riding and achieve optimal group work by applying the hypothesis described in ‘The Emergence of Altruistic Humans’. Furthermore, it argues for the reasons why one should live correctly.
First, to prevent free-riding, individual evaluations must be added to the group assessment rather than awarding the same score to the entire group. Without individual evaluations, students receive grades based solely on the group’s outcome, regardless of their personal contribution, which can foster free-riding tendencies. Including individual evaluations thus primarily prevents free-riding, as individuals will actively participate in group activities to secure a favorable individual grade. The ‘costly signaling hypothesis’ introduced in ‘The Emergence of Altruistic Humans’ explains that individuals signal their abilities through altruistic actions within a group to receive corresponding rewards. Accordingly, group members will participate in activities to increase their contribution and receive a higher individual evaluation.
The challenge now is “How to conduct individual evaluations?” Unless it’s something countable, like how many bricks each person carried, contributions to group activities vary in nature and importance, and it’s difficult to express them with precise metrics. Ideally, the professor assigning the final grade would observe and judge all activities to assign scores. However, realistically, it’s impossible for the professor to participate in and observe every activity each group performs. Therefore, the professor needs an agent to observe the group members on their behalf, and this can be achieved through the group leader.
Now, let’s consider what role to assign the group leader. Even if the group leader is simply tasked with observing and evaluating the members, the leader themselves could potentially free-ride. Therefore, the professor grades the team leader based on the team’s overall outcome. This approach ensures the team leader actively guides the group toward the best possible result, naturally encouraging active participation and eliminating any incentive for the leader to free-ride.
The team leader’s role in group activities is crucial. They are not merely the group’s representative but bear the responsibility of evaluating the team’s performance and each member’s contribution. The team leader must exercise leadership to maximize the group’s performance, such as guiding members and identifying each member’s strengths to assign appropriate tasks. Furthermore, under the team leader’s guidance, members fulfill their respective roles and responsibilities, enabling the team to achieve optimal results through teamwork. In this structure, the potential for free-riding naturally diminishes, allowing the purpose of the group activity to be fulfilled.
Now, group members may develop a motivation to free-ride, assuming the leader will work hard and they can benefit from it. This can be addressed by the professor assigning a total score for the group’s output, which the leader then distributes to each member based on their contribution. Consequently, each member will participate more actively and work together to ensure the group receives a high total score. Furthermore, based on the previously mentioned costly signaling hypothesis, this approach can encourage altruistic and active participation as members seek to receive a larger share of the total points.
However, since the leader may be biased or lack objectivity when distributing points, members evaluate each other’s activities. The professor then determines the final score based on both the points assigned by the leader and the mutual evaluations among members. Similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two suspects face interrogation and their sentences are determined by their choices to remain silent or confess, if it’s a one-time choice situation, individuals can gain an advantage by making selfish choices. However, the Repeated Reciprocity Hypothesis posits that in situations where choices are made repeatedly and individuals face each other, each person will make altruistic choices. When group activities conclude and mutual evaluation occurs without further interaction, individuals tend to behave altruistically. Each group member will actively participate in group activities rather than free-riding.
Finally, since significant contributors may receive low evaluations due to group dynamics, a remedy must be established allowing students to appeal the group leader’s assigned scores and evaluations to the professor. This serves as a crucial mechanism to ensure individual contributions are objectively evaluated and prevent unfair situations.
To fundamentally prevent free-riding incentives, individual scores are assigned instead of group scores. For objective evaluation, aspects the professor cannot realistically observe are realized through the group leader. The group leader assigns scores based on the group’s performance, eliminating the possibility of the leader free-riding and encouraging active participation and leadership. To prevent situations where only the group leader works hard while others free-ride, allowing the leader to distribute the group’s total score based on each member’s contribution eliminates the incentive for free-riding. This encourages all members to actively participate, primarily to secure a higher group score. To ensure objective scoring aligned with the instructor’s intent, group members conduct mutual evaluations. The instructor then sets the final scores by comparing these with the scores assigned by the group leader. Finally, to prevent contributions from being undervalued due to interpersonal dynamics among group members, the instructor allows for appeals. Using this method blocks the motivation for free-riding among all group members, including the leader. The group leader benefits from high scores only if the group performs well, and group members also receive higher individual scores when the group achieves a high total score. Therefore, active participation is necessary to secure favorable individual evaluations, creating an environment where all members, including the leader, are motivated to engage fully in group activities.
Group activities can be viewed as a microcosm of society. However, because the duration is short, economically speaking, there is an incentive to act selfishly, like free-riding, when others act altruistically. This discourages everyone from actively participating in group activities. Therefore, the methods and rules presented above use repeated-interactions to mitigate the constraint of finite duration, creating an environment where everyone can participate altruistically in group activities.
The society we actually live in is far more complex and diverse. While some interactions, like those in workplaces or organizations, are sustained over time, the duration of relationships varies enormously, like passing someone on the street and never seeing them again. In cases like the former, where interactions persist long-term, people naturally tend to act altruistically toward each other. This is because acting unfairly and harming someone in this context risks retaliation from that person later on.
