It seems that gift-exchange and team production are closely linked.
Collaboration seems to make people much more generous towards each other than
when players are acting as individuals. This is indicated in the New York Times
article, “How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles.” This distinction between
viewing yourself as a teammate or an individual in a group is very important in
my experience.
I remember what was my first-ever economics group project back in my
first year of college. None of my classmates knew each other, and the teams of
about eight or nine were separated at random. I remember that many of my
teammates were often missing from class and failed to make any sort of
impression on me. In our first meeting as a team, there were only about four of
us that attended, and we spent most of the time getting to know one another. In
particular, one of my teammates and I happened to sit next to each other in
class throughout the semester, so we got to know each other better and became
better at working together.
What this did was separated our team into four different kinds of “groups”
(1 or 2 people) which I’ll refer to as Groups A, B, C, and D, respectively:
there were those that never spoke or showed up to class, those that showed up
to class but didn’t participate much, those that showed up to class and stayed relatively
connected, and my classmate and I who corresponded on a daily basis.
By the time we presented our
project to the class, these four groups proved to have four distinct and
corresponding levels of productivity. Group A played no real part in the
assignment. Group B did bare-minimum work that didn’t mesh well with the
overall project. Group C had decent work and pulled their weight during the
presentation. Group A, my classmate and I, however, ended up contributing about
50-60% of the finished product.
The treatment of the four groups during grading were interesting: Group
A, which didn’t show up for presentations at all was singled out. They failed
while the rest of us got a grade boost; a fact that none of us argued against.
Group B surprisingly didn’t show up either, but the rest of us assured the
professor that they did, at very least, what they were supposed to (other than
showing up for presentations). Only half of Group B showed up. One of the two
were sick, but since he did good work and was sincere about why he couldn’t
attend, we insisted that they be given the same grade as those that presented. We
shared our grade with him despite having to do more work presenting on his
behalf. That leaves just three out eight or nine that actually presented.
The connection between teammates resulted in two things: the connected
were much more willing to work hard and were much more willing to defend each
other’s actions. The disconnected failed to impress and received no support
when it came to grading.
Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that collaboration made certain
people more productive. It could very well mean that
those who were too lazy to go to class were too lazy to give an effort on the
project. There’s just a few reasons that indicate that collaboration may have
been a factor. The teammate that I connected most with and I were the two most
productive members of the team by far. Also, as time went on, the team as a
whole became more and more productive after every time we met. Assuming we all
had the same level of motivation to do well, which was the to get a decent
grade, a possible reason for the difference in work was collaboration and team
productivity.
Student teams with 8 students per team sounds kind of large. I wonder if everyone had actually participated whether your product would have been worse than under the circumstance that you do describe. It seemed there was some learning by doing and you were able to avoid a too many cooks spoils the broth problem with how the work got allocated. Having all 8 participate a little might have blocked the learning by doing and encourage more of the team members to want to play the role of boss.
ReplyDeleteThat said, whenever students write about their own experience with class projects, they are invariably part of the group that does the majority of the work. So I hear the sort of story you told fairly often. I never hear the story from the point of view of the non-contributors. Were they really free riding and doing so knowingly, or did they have a legitimate excuse for their non-participation, or might they even claim that they actually did work on the project? I don't know but that perspective is typically missing from these stories.
There is one fundamental way where your experience differs from the experiments that Haidt describes. In those experiments, whether the other kid was perceived as making a contribution or not was determined purely by the technology - were the strings the kids were pulling connected or not? In your class project example, participation in the group work was a choice of each member. Further, there is a social norm at play by which others regard this choice, namely that students are expected to pull their own weight. After all, this wasn't some random grouping. It was done within a course that assigns letter grades to students. That setting conditions the willingness to share, no doubt.
I agree that the size of the team may have been detrimental. As I mentioned in my post, not all of our work meshed well. That’s because we couldn’t keep everyone on the same page. It did seem as though we got more collaborative later on when we had to make up for the missing members’ work. By that time we essentially had a smaller group and a short amount of time left to finish.
ReplyDeleteAs for everyone wanting to be the boss, that’s an interesting point. We just had two leaders who fortunately worked well together. We were able to maintain a general direction for the group. In this case, the extrinsic motivation that was our grade wasn’t enough to inspire people to do their work let alone lead the team. I still wonder whether the rest of the group was free riding or just really apathetic. It’s not something they were going to get away with.