the dilemma of cooperation in student...

Running head: The Dilemma of COOPERATION IN STUDENT GROUPWORK 1

The Dilemma of Cooperation in Student Groupwork

The Dilemma of COOPERATION IN STUDENT GROUPWORK 2

Abstract

This paper is concerned not with the effects or benefits of groupwork in education, but with its key pre-requisite: whether students will commit to and contribute to the group effort rather than free ride on the efforts of others. Despite the prevalence of research on cooperative forms of instruction, there is little recognition in educational research of the social dilemma between self- and collective-interest associated with all forms of collective action. Yet recently, there has been a wealth of research on understanding and solving social dilemmas across a range of social and behavioral sciences. This paper provides an overview and entry point into this literature. Emerging research across cultures and settings indicates that, rather than acting on the basis of self-interest, the majority of people practice, teach, and enforce norms of fairness and reciprocity. In addition, people expend energy in building networks of trust and maintaining reputations for trustworthiness. Structural features that facilitate cooperation include repeated opportunities for face to face communication, which provide the basis for participants to make and enforce commitments toward the common good. In addition, participants who believe that they will work together for a lengthy duration are more likely to invest in rule-making to better fit their context, and take pro-social actions. These principles can serve as the basis for accounting for and predicting cooperation by researchers in educational settings that use groupwork, as well as for instructional designers and teaching practitioners in creating conditions more likely to facilitate rather than hinder cooperation.

1. KEYWORDS: COOPERATION, COOPERATIVE LEARNING, FREE RIDING, GROUPWORK, SOCIAL DILEMMA.


The Dilemma of Cooperation in Student Groupwork

Using collaborative forms of student groupwork has become a common practice in education, and for good reason: it can increase learning and social development in comparison to individualized teaching and learning (Johnson & Johnson, 1989). This paper focuses not on theoretical accounts for why groupwork can lead to these learning gains, nor on the different outcomes that often result; these have been extensively reviewed elsewhere (Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Sharan, 1990; Slavin, 1995). Rather, this paper focuses on the key prerequisite for groupwork: whether students will cooperate rather than free ride on the efforts of others. By cooperation, I mean “engaging with others in a mutually beneficial activity” (Bowles & Gintis, 2011, p. 2). Teachers can assign students to groups, and can closely monitor their activity, intervening as necessary. But it is only students who make the decision whether to commit to and invest their energy, time, and creativity in the joint enterprise they have either been assigned or set for themselves. And such self-motivated commitment and action becomes increasingly important in groupwork that extends beyond the boundaries of the classroom and the teacher’s gaze, and as students develop from the early grades through higher education.What is the central problem of cooperation? Joan Silk (2009) provides the quintessential example in education:

You are in fifth grade, and the teacher divides you into groups to do reports on Civil War battles. There is always one person in the group who slacks off—he promises to do something, but does not come through. In this case, the interests of individuals are not all aligned—the group wants to produce a great project, but one of its members would rather watch TV than spend time in the library. Committee work is just the adult version of the group project. (p. 114)

Whether called teamwork (Smith, 2004), team-based learning (Michaelsen, Knight, & Fink, 2004), groupwork (Smith, 1996), collaborative learning (Wang & Lin, 2007), cooperative learning (Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Slavin, 1995), or similar, all forms of collective activity where students work toward a common goal are subject to this problem, which goes by such terms as free riding (Boehm, 2012; Marwell & Ames, 1981), social loafing (Kayes, 2005; Sheffield, 2012), and shirking (Miller, 1993). This problem arises whenever there is a conflict between individual and collective interest, what has often been termed a social dilemma (Kollock, 1998) or collective action problem (Olson, 1965). As a result, it is well studied in the social sciences, with some viewing it as the central open problem. In his 2005 Presidential Address to the Royal Society, Lord Robert May (2005) stated, “The most important unanswered question in evolutionary biology, and more generally in the social sciences, is how co-operative behaviour evolved and can be maintained in human or other animal groups and societies” (p. 1). And in her 1997 Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association, Elinor Ostrom (the 2009 Nobel prize winner in Economics; 1998) states “the theory of collective action is the central problem of Political Science” (p. 1). Cooperation is particularly problematic because of long-held assumptions that people are primarily selfish, so that that without centralized government to establish individual rights and coerce cooperation, life would be a “war … of every man against every man … and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes, 1651, pp. 77–8). But if people are fundamentally selfish, then how did complex institutions (such as central government and individual rights) ever get an evolutionary foothold? Won’t cooperators simply pay too high a cost for their cooperation, succumbing to evolutionary pressures that favor the selfish?Over the last 25 years, social scientists from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, zoology, biology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and psychology, have begun to challenge these long-held assumptions about human behavior and institutions, and in so doing to sketch the outlines of a theory of cooperation. Researchers are demonstrating that in a variety of settings, many individuals have


internalized shared norms of reciprocity: to return cooperation with cooperation, to punish free riders (Gintis, Bowles, Boyd, & Fehr, 2005), and to feel guilt or shame when violating these internalized norms (Boehm, 2012; Bowles & Gintis, 2011). These researchers as well are demonstrating that coercive, centralized government is often absent or of minor importance in hundreds of communities worldwide who have successfully managed their shared natural resources (Ostrom, 1990), and that external coercion often results in poorer performance and lower motivation to cooperate than reliance on internalized norms and lightweight sanctioning from peers (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Frey & Jegen, 2000; Lam, 1998). On the other hand, participants within social dilemma situations have strong internal motivation to punish free riders, and can do so more effectively and at lower cost than external 3rd parties. Often, simply the threat of punishment is sufficient to cause those who would otherwise deviate from reciprocal norms to cooperate.This emerging body of research results, what I encapsulate in the term “Cooperation Theory,” has important implications for the structuring of groupwork in education, since both instructional designs and interpretations of research data embed assumptions about both human behavior as well as the causal role of policies (rules, guidelines, requirements) that structure groupwork. Assuming that most students are fundamentally altruistic or selfish, or not understanding the impact of such structural variables as face-to-face communication and rule enforcement can lead to misinterpreting results in educational research studies (for the researcher) and the setting of groupwork policies that will hinder rather than facilitate cooperation (for the instructional designer). And yet, despite the importance of group-based forms of learning in Education, recognition of the central problem of cooperation is virtually absent in educational research. Table 1 evidences this absence, in showing the number of results resulting from a search in all fields of several terms related to cooperation and free riding in ERIC as compared to other academic databases. And in an editorial to a 2007 special issue on collaborative learning in Educational Psychology Review, Palincsar (2007) notes this yet unsolved central “tension” between the individual and the group, recognizing that this tension “remains with the field and offers grist for future research” (p. 89). Much of this research, however, has already been carried out in other fields.There are three contributions of this paper. The first is to frame groupwork in education as a social dilemma, and in so doing, to link educational groupwork to a large body of theory in the social sciences on understanding and increasing cooperation in social dilemmas. The second is to summarize some of the important theoretical results in Cooperation Theory, both on models of human behavior, and on the structural conditions that have causal impact on whether cooperation is achieved and sustained. And the third is to outline some of the important implications of Cooperation Theory that can help in the design of research studies and instruction. In total, this paper should help the educational researcher in analyzing settings that involve groupwork and in building education-specific theory related to groupwork and cooperation. In addition, by making the structural aspects of cooperation more visible, this paper should help both the instructional designer and practitioner design teaching to better facilitate cooperation. And finally, this paper should help policy makers better predict how particular policies might impact teachers' uses of and student engagement in groupwork for learning.

1. a The Political Economy of Groups Social dilemmas. Social dilemmas are common to social life. Ostrom (1998) defines social dilemmas as arising “whenever individuals in interdependent situations face choices in which the maximization of short-term self-interest yields outcomes leaving all participants worse off than feasible alternatives” (p. 1). In other words “[s]ocial dilemmas are situations in which individual rationality leads to collective irrationality” (Kollock, 1998, p. 183). Many real-world situations give rise to social dilemmas. Ostrom points out that contributing to public goods, such as pubic television or national defense, result in social dilemmas. “[A]ll those who would benefit from the provision of a public good … find it


costly to contribute and would prefer others to pay for the the good instead. Yet, everyone would be better off if everyone were to contribute” (Ostrom, 1998, p. 1). And Miller (1993) illustrates how all forms of groupwork (whether in educational, corporate, civic, or family settings) have these same characteristics. “In [a simple group setting] . . . individuals would be better off working hard than shirking. . . . If the other works hard, each person is better off shirking. If the other one shirks, each is better off shirking. Each person has a dominant strategy to shirk, despite the fact that [they] are worse off when each chooses his or her dominant strategy” (p. 31). This is precisely the problem that students are faced with when placed in groups. When there are joint rewards, there is always the temptation to receive the rewards without contributing sufficiently to achieving the goals that yield the rewards.Perhaps the best-known example of a social dilemma is provided by Garrett Hardin, in his 1968 article in Science. He describes a group of herdsmen sharing a common pasture, where each has an individual incentive to increase his herd by more animals, since the cost of grazing on the commons is distributed across the community of herdsman while the benefit of the additional animals is realized by the individual herdsman. But if every herdsman reasons in this way, then the carrying capacity of the commons will be exceeded. “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1244).Because social dilemmas are so well studied, they have been identified by a number of different terms, which include:

the public-good or collective good problem (Olson 1965, P. Samuelson 1954), shirking (Alchian and Demsetz 1972), the free-rider problem (Edney 1979, Grossman and Hart 1980), moral hazard (Holmstrom 1982), the credible commitment dilemma (Williams, Collins, and Lichbach 1997), generalized social exchange (Ekeh 1974; Emerson 1972a, 1972b; Yamagishi and Cook 1993), the tragedy of the commons (G. Hardin 1968), and exchanges of threats and violent confrontations (Boulding 1963). (Ostrom, 1998, p. 2)

For simplicity and consistency, I will refer to these situations as social dilemmas throughout the balance of the paper.There is considerable evidence in the historical record of tragedy in the commons, from collapse of fisheries (Roberts, 2007; Safina, 1995) to the destruction of forests (Agrawal, 2007) to the warming of the earth’s atmosphere (Hughes, 2000). But when faced with the possibility of such tragedy, many groups of people from across the globe have successfully managed their shared commons over many generations (Berkes, Feeny, McCay, & Acheson, 1989; Maass & Anderson, 1978; Netting, 1981; Ostrom, 1990). Doing so, however, requires the individuals involved to craft situation-specific social institutions so as to offset selfishness and opportunism in favor of the collective good.Institutions. There has been considerable effort in political science, economics, social science, and philosophy to define the structure and teleology of human institutions. In the balance of this paper, I draw particularly from the definitions provided by Ostrom (2005) and Searle (1999), (though Tomasello, 2009, North, 1990, Knight, 1992, and Hodgson, 2006, have similar conceptions). Institutions are normative statements that represent common knowledge about social roles, and what individuals in particular social roles ought to do under particular conditions. Institutions can be thought of as sets of rules, laws, policies, guidelines, or norms. Institutions are either externally enforced, through such means as gossip, shunning, or proscribed punishments, or intrinsically followed, through sentiments such as pride, shame or guilt. It is this normative force that impacts the fundamental motivational structures that underlie human action. “In many ways, the most distinctive feature of human social organization is its normative structure. Human beings


not only have statistical expectations about what others will do—which all apes have—they also have normative expectations about what others should do” (Tomasello & Vaish, 2013, p. 238).Institutional analysts generally distinguish between two kinds of institution: what Searle (1999) calls constitutive versus regulative. Constitutive institutions assign to objects a new status that reflects common agreement concerning their social function that is not inherent in the physical characteristics of the object, as for instance when paper is treated as money. Ostrom (2005) notes that constitutive institutions are commonly used to create social roles (such as “voter, judge, mayor”), or organizations (“e.g., the U.S. Senate”; p. 138). In educational groupwork, important constitutive institutions are those that create the groups in which students work and any particular roles associated with the groups, such as scribe, or facilitator. Complementing constitutive institutions are regulative institutions, which stipulate what may, must, or must not be done by individuals in particular social roles under particular conditions. Whereas constitutive institutions create new status functions, such as scribe, regulative institutions signify the rights and responsibilities of individuals associated with these status functions, e.g. that scribes are to take notes about what occurs during group meetings and distribute these notes to all group members within 24 hours of the end of the meeting.Taken together, constitutive and regulative rules specify groups, organizations, social roles, and the duties and responsibilities of participants in social settings. When teachers use groupwork, they generally set the basic policies under which students work, many of which are made explicit and shared with students. But groupwork is embedded within enclosing institutional structures all of which impact behavior. These include the norms that students and the teacher bring with them into the classroom from their families, neighborhoods, communities, and nation. They include as well the policies and laws governing interactions within the classroom, school, school district, city, region, and country, all of which have accompanying social roles associated with enforcement of the rules that regulate human conduct.Institutions are important to study because they are ubiquitous and, due to their normative force, they make other people's actions predictable (North, 1990); in so doing they are fundamental in the creation and maintenance of social order (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). For educational researchers, knowing the underlying institutions of group, classroom, school, etc., provides a basis for accounting for past outcomes, predicting future behavior, and generalizing across research settings. While for instructional designers, institutions are the primary degrees of freedom that they have in setting the structural conditions under which students interact.Classical institutional solutions to solving social dilemmas. Hardin asserts that only two institutional arrangements are possible to solve social dilemmas: privatization or centralized control. In the case of a shared commons, privatization means splitting the commons into separately owned parcels, while in the case of contributing to public goods (such as work effort), this means splitting the collective task into smaller, individual tasks. The logic of privatization is that no individual has an incentive to free ride when all benefits and costs are born solely by the individual. With centralized control, commons can remain shared, and groups can have collective tasks, but a third-party with coercive power is required to enforce the social rules. As Matthews and Phyne (1988) point out, these two institutional possibilities represent a political choice that has been discussed since the 17th century, between Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and John Locke’s natural rights view of private property (1690/1980). Although considerably different policy choices, solutions to social dilemmas involving private property or central government embed an assumption that an individual's self-regard will always trump his or her regard for others. And this assumption has served as


the foundation for the standard rational choice model of human behavior so prevalent in economics and the social sciences since Locke and Hobbes. Edgeworth (1881, p. 104), one of the principal architects of late 19th century economics, states “The first principle of economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest,” and this belief is embedded in the vast majority of social policies, managerial prescriptions, and economic theories. Yet, as the research described below indicates, this central assumption of self-interest is being replaced by a view of individuals as primarily self-regulating through the internalization of prosocial community norms and the desire to maintain a trustworthy reputation. And successful groups, even in the absence of centralized government, have created a large variety of rules that include such structural features as increasing face-to-face communication, group participation in rule-setting and enforcement, and opportunities for repeated interactions over time, all of which help these groups to achieve their collective goals.The political economy of educational groupwork. With regard to educational settings, the choice between Locke and Hobbes is also built into many instructional designs, thereby reifying the implicit assumption that students are primarily self-regarding and will free ride if given the opportunity. The Lockean solution is to simply abandon all effort to have groupwork, to privatize all learning outcomes and rewards, the predominant mode in engineering education for over half a century (Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005), and similarly for many other disciplines. For those who do use groupwork, however, Hobbesian solutions predominate, where the students are accountable to the teacher who alone holds the power to set and enforce group policies. For example, Smith (n.d.) advises teachers to “keep group size small, assign roles, randomly ask one member of the group to explain the learning, have students do work before group meets, have students use their group learning to do an individual task afterward, everyone signs: ‘I participated, I agree, and I can explain the information,’ observe & record individual contributions.” Many of these strategies are echoed by Johnson and Johnson (2000) who suggest “keeping group size small, giving an individual test to each student, giving random individual oral examinations, observing and recording the frequency with which each member contributes to the group’s work, having students teach what they know to someone else, and having students use what they have learned on different problems” (p. 501). In the political economy of the classroom, the teacher is sovereign and students are subjects under their coercive authority. This is so taken for granted, so seemingly natural, that it is rarely noticed, let alone commented on: individual accountability is accountability to the teacher.There are, however, a number of problems with the Hobbesian solution of using only external, teacher-enforced rules and norms for cooperation. To foreshadow the research summarized below, these problems include: reductions in intrinsic motivation, perceptions of unfairness, and lack of moral and self-regulatory development. It is thus important to move beyond Hobbes in the structuring of groupwork in education, drawing on the rich vein of research emerging form the social sciences that demonstrate that alternatives are possible and often preferable. Adopting the perspective of the classroom as having a political economy, and in particular being subject to social dilemmas, allows applying the considerable amount of theory already developed for understanding and attempting to mitigate the problems of cooperation observed in other settings. It is to these theoretical results that I now turn.

2. METHODResearch in cooperation has taken place within a number of disciplinary fields, particularly anthropology, biology, sociology, political science, economics, and psychology. Methodologically, three main traditions have been most prominent. One involves laboratory experiments using formal, game-theoretic rules to structure the roles, actions, outcomes, and payoffs for dyads and small groups of individuals within a controlled environment. The lab provides the opportunity to construct new games to structure individual incentives in a precise fashion to answer particular research questions (e.g. “do


individuals punish others in order to alter future behavior or for retribution”), and hundreds of games have been defined with such names as the Trust game, the Dictator game, the Ultimatum game, and, perhaps most famously, the Prisoner’s Dilemma.As an example, consider a Public Goods Game in which there is a single role, called player, and n participants who each take on the player role, where n is fixed (e.g. n=5) in any particular experiment. The players are each given a fixed amount (e.g. $10) in their “private bank” at the start of play. For each round, they can contribute from $0 to the total in their private bank to a public pot. Every player decides privately and simultaneously how much to contribute within a single round. After each has made their decision, the experimenter adds some “public benefit” to the public pot, such as an additional 50% to what has been contributed from all players, and divides the total (contributions plus public benefit) equally among all of the players (i.e. deposits it in each player’s private bank), regardless of each player’s individual contributions. The round ends. The game can be played for one or multiple rounds. The players are all told the rules at the start of play, so that these rules are common knowledge. This game thus replicates in a simple fashion a public goods dilemma, since an individual’s material payoffs are maximized when he or she contributes $0 and everyone else contributes their entire private bank. Given this specification, one can thus “run” this game in a lab environment using volunteers and observe how individuals make choices under different rules. The volunteers are most usually university undergraduates, though a small number of game-theoretic experiments have been run in field settings among members of small, resource-sharing communities (Barr, 2001; Cárdenas, 2002) and modern-day hunter-gatherers (Henrich et al., 2004). The second research tradition involves field studies of behavior in communities across the world where groups face social dilemmas in a range of environments within their everyday lives. These are most often case studies undertaken by anthropologists who have spent considerable time in the field, such as Netting’s (1981) studies of alpine Swiss villagers sharing communal forests, or Maas and Anderson’s (1978) reports of villagers sharing irrigation canals in the dry regions of Spain. Unlike the lab, these studies are descriptively rich, with considerable complexity resulting from the interaction of a variety of human and environmental factors. When studied using some common framework that identifies a common set of variables to measure, case studies of individual communities can be compared for purposes of generalization (Ragin, 1987; Yin, 2003). For example, Lam (1998) compares the institutional arrangements in 127 irrigation systems in Nepal using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework (Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994; Ostrom, 2005) to determine that farmer-managed irrigation systems are considerably more effective than government-managed systems. Using the same analysis framework, Ostrom (1990) and her colleagues compare the institutions in dozens of case studies of resource-sharing communities to determine the institutional characteristics (what they call design principles) associated with successful resource governance.A third method is the use of computer simulations of social systems, often called agent-based modeling. “Agent-based modeling is a tool for analyzing complex dynamical systems as a complement to explicit mathematical analysis where the latter is either impossible or uninformative” (Bowles & Gintis, 2011, p. 202). Dynamical systems can be modeled according to the formal rules of game theory, with the players implemented using computer programs, based on different assumptions about how people make choices in social dilemmas. This method allows scientists to run simulations across thousands of generations to determine if particular individual behavioral strategies for particular games are evolutionarily possible, stable, or resistant to invasion by agents playing other strategies. The theory described below will thus draw on a range of disciplines and methods, none of which alone are sufficient to answer questions about how cooperation is achieved and sustained, but together are providing considerable evidence concerning the individual and structural conditions that give rise to cooperation. This theory can be primarily grouped


into two broad categories: (a) characteristics of individuals and the relations among them and (b) structural features of the situations in which individuals interact. Although it is the structural features that are most easily subject to intentional design and change, i.e. by changing the policies that underwrite groupwork, it is important for the educational researcher and instructional designer to have accurate models of individuals as social actors. Not only will this enable anticipation of how individuals might behave as a result of institutional changes, but because teachers are themselves actors within the educational setting that they are hoping to impact, their relations with students (e.g. if students perceive them as trustworthy and fair) will affect the extent to which cooperation emerges in that setting.

3. RESULTS.3. a Individual and Relational ModelsNorm internalization, identity, and social emotions. The standard model of individual choice that has dominated economics and “also come to dominate substantial subfields of political science, sociology, law, and philosophy” (Anderson, 2000, p. 170), homo economicus, rests on the assumption that human action is guided by a mentalistic calculus of the pains and pleasures that one expects to receive in the likely situations that result from the different action choices available at any point in time. In short, people are self-interested, acting so as to maximize their own pleasure or “utility.” Over the last several decades, this model has been subjected to a large number of empirical tests (some of which are reported below), and found considerably wanting. “Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world” (Henrich et al., 2005, p. 795). “There is probably no other hypothesis about human behavior so thoroughly discredited on empirical grounds that still operates as a standard working assumption in any discipline” (Anderson, 2000, p. 173). Alternative accounts of human behavior, of man as homo sociologicus, hinge on the supposition that people internalize shared norms through a process of socialization (i.e. learning) within a community of people who share these norms. When norms are internalized, they are “taken on as preferences to be sought in their own right rather than constraints on behavior or instrumental means to other ends” (Bowles & Gintis, 2011, p. 169). Parsons and Shils (1962) trace the conception of internalized norms historically to Freud’s “theory of the superego” and Durkheim’s theory of the “institutionalization of social norms” (p. 22). Norms are not simply rules imposed by a monolithic society that are blindly followed by “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel, 1967) or the “oversocialized” individual (Wrong, 1960). Rather they are preferences, associated “more to cross-cutting groups and less to society as a whole” (Hitlin & Vaisey, 2013, p. 53), so that internalized norms may conflict with other norms as well as with self-interest. “Socialization models have been strongly criticized for suggesting that people adopt norms independent of their perceived payoffs. In fact, people do not always blindly follow the norms that have been inculcated in them, but at least at times treat compliance as a strategic choice” (Bowles & Gintis, 2003, p. 13). Internalized social norms thus influence but do not determine individual behavior. Drawing on the work of Cooley, Mead, and James, Berger and Luckmann (1966) describe that “internalization occurs only as identification occurs” so that “the self is a reflected entity, reflecting the attitudes first taken by significant others toward it” (pp. 131–2). In short, in order to be one of us, I am obligated do things this way and to have these beliefs (Anderson, 2000). “[S]ocial norms are part of the social identity of the group: This is the way we dress; this is the way we behave at weddings or at funerals. If you do not follow these norms, you are in an important sense not one of us” (Tomasello, 2011, p. 21). Tyler and Blader (2000) underscore the importance of group identification—“the degree to which people merge their sense of self with the group” (Tyler, 2010, p. 39)—to the construction of identity. High identification with a group significantly impacts cooperation with others in the group, since in this case “[a]cting in the interests of the group is acting in one’s self-


interest” (Tyler, 2010, p. 40). But group identification is also associated with lower levels of cooperation with those outside the group. This tendency for ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility is often called parochialism. In a variety of settings, identification as insider or outsider is often related to differences or similarities in language, ethnic group, religion, or organizational membership (Bowles & Gintis, 2011). As a result of these identifications, “individuals often favor fellow group members over ‘outsiders’ in the choice of friends, exchange partners, and other associates and in the allocation of valued resources” (Bowles & Gintis, 2011, p. 134).In discussing a series of empirical studies with young children, Tomasello and Vaish (2013) argue that norms develop ontogenetically in a two-stage process. In the first stage, prior to around age 3, young children enter into shared goals with specific others, which has attendant obligations associated with role responsibilities toward achieving these shared goals. These obligations are interpersonal and specific, voiced in the first and second person, and enforced (and enforceable) toward ones partners, e.g. “we agreed to do this, and you are not doing your part.” The second stage, occurring around age 3, involves recognition that everyone in the child’s social world is obliged to follow norms. These norms are impersonal and general, and are voiced in the third person or the impersonal. It is in this latter stage that such impersonal norms begin to be enforced on third parties.

Together, these recent findings suggest that, at least by 3 years of age, children do not view social norms solely in terms of authority, as Piaget assumed. Rather, they recognize them as general, agent-neutral, mutual expectations that represent some kind of implicit agreement of how we ought to behave. (Tomasello & Vaish, 2013, p. 247).

In addition, Tomasello and his co-authors argue that this two-stage ontogenetic process mirrors a species-specific phylogenetic process of moral development, with the first stage in the middle Pleistocene involving interdependent collaborative foraging, and the second stage in the late Pleistocene, involving intragroup prosocial norms and intergroup competition (Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman, & Herrmann, 2012; Tomasello & Vaish, 2013).There is considerable evidence that the internalization of norms is supported affectively through an evolved set of social emotions, particularly shame, guilt, and pride (with the other social emotions being love, embarrassment, anger, and jealousy; Plutchik, 1980); guilt when norms are not followed, shame when the violation of norms becomes known to others, and pride for complying with norms. According to Christopher Boehm (2012), possessing such norm-based emotions is what it means to have a conscience. This conscience is, as he describes it, our “‘inner voice,’ laced with self-judgmental moral feeling” (p. 28) that “slow[s] us down sufficiently that we are able … to pick and choose which behaviors we care to exhibit before our peers” (p. 30) so as to prevent social disapproval and punishment and develop a strong sense of belonging and identification with the cultural groups whose norms we have internalized. “If the glue of primate societies is individual social relationships, the super glue of human societies is generalized social norms” (Tomasello, 2011, p. 20).Norms of fairness and reciprocity. Although norms differ by culture, two prosocial norms are found in some form in virtually every culture: fairness and reciprocity. When individuals internalize these norms, the likelihood for cooperation significantly increases.Fairness. There are a number of conceptions of fairness (or justice; Binmore, 2009; Rawls, 1971; Tyler, 2010), but two have received considerable attention in philosophy, social psychology, organizational behavior, and anthropology: distributive and procedural. In distributive fairness, individuals are concerned that outcomes are equitable, generally interpreted as equal shares among those who contributed effort, or shares proportional to effort. Results from experiments with the Ultimatum Game provide strong evidence of a cross-cultural norm of distributive fairness. In the Ultimatum Game, a proposer is given a


fixed amount of money (e.g. $10), and decides how this amount will be split with a responder. The responder can either accept the split, in which case both players keep their portions as determined by the proposer, or reject it, in which case both receive nothing. This game is typically played anonymously in a one-shot fashion. If both players use selfish strategies and believe that the other is adopting such a strategy, then the proposer will always offer the minimum amount, and the responder will always accept. In reporting the results of experiments played in research laboratories around the world, predominantly with university students, Gintis et al. (2005) report that the modal offer is 50%, and offers of less than 30% are routinely rejected. The commonly accepted account for this is that individuals are driven not only by self-regard, but have significant fairness norms that shape their behavior. In addition, they are motivated to “punish” those who violate these norms by rejecting low offers, even though this means relinquishing the amount offered.Despite the involvement of individuals from different cultures, university students nonetheless are not representative of the cultural diversity across the globe. To try to determine the extent to which fairness and reciprocity norms are universal, a cross-disciplinary group of anthropologists, psychologists, and economists carried out a comparative set of field studies in which members of 15 diverse societies (“three foraging societies, six that practice slash-and-burn horticulture, four nomadic herding groups, and two sedentary, small-scale agricultural societies”; Henrich et al., 2004, p. 10) played experimental games with others from their own culture. The stakes offered were significant, equivalent to approximately one day of wages. They found considerable variation in these results across groups. In the anonymous, one-shot Ultimatum Game, modal offers in the different societies ranged between 15% and 50%, with responders from some groups never rejecting any offers, while some responders in other groups rejected offers higher than 50%. A statistical regression analysis revealed that those having more market integration and cooperative forms of production behaved most like university students, and that these two factors accounted for 50% of the variance between groups (Gintis et al., 2005). Despite this diversity, behavior in these experimental games was inconsistent with self-regarding homo economicus, but mirrored culturally-specific forms of behavior in their day-to-day interactions. To take one example, “[a]mong the the Aché, seventy-nine percent of proposers offered either forty or fifty percent, and sixteen percent offered more than fifty percent, with no rejected offers. In daily life, the Aché regularly share meat, which is distributed equally among all households irrespective of which hunter made the catch” (Gintis et al., 2005, p. 29).

Such egalitarian distribution of meat is not uncommon. In a literature review, Kaplan and Gurven (2005) discuss food-sharing practices among modern-day hunter-gatherer societies, particularly concerning distribution of large game that requires considerable cooperative labor to secure. Although there is variation across cultures, there are nonetheless strong egalitarian norms in the sharing, particularly among those who participate in the hunt. “[W]hen cooperative task groups form, food is often shared equally among the participants. When those task groups do not include members from all families in the residential group, a system of primary and secondary sharing is very common. In the primary distribution, all participants in the cooperative activity receive approximately equal shares of the total catch” (p. 102).In procedural fairness, individuals are concerned with the fairness of the rules and procedures used to make decisions and determine outcomes (Crawshaw, Cropanzano, Bell, & Nadisic, 2013). Tyler and his colleagues have done some of the key work in procedural fairness, in shaping its definition, modeling it theoretically, and carrying out a range of empirical studies to demonstrate its impact on cooperation (Tyler & Blader, 2003; Tyler, 2006, 2010, 2013). Across a range of domains, from citizen participation in law enforcement, criminal compliance with sentencing, and cooperation in a variety of organizational settings, these researchers provide strong evidence that individual perceptions of procedural justice are a central psychological aspect influencing cooperation. For example, in a large-scale survey study within work organizations, procedural justice was found to be one of the most significant factors influencing


cooperation in work, particularly for those public-spirited behaviors viewed as voluntary and discretionary that were not strictly required by employment agreements (Tyler, 2010). In Tyler and Blader’s group engagement model (2003), they indicate that procedural justice involves not only judgments about the fairness of rules and procedures, but also about interpersonal treatment when subject to such procedures. Making these judgments involves determining such things as: transparency and understandability of the rules and procedures, neutrality of the actors involved in enforcement, objectivity of the information used in decision making, consistency of rule application across situations and individuals, and explicitness of decision rationales by those charged with enforcement (Tyler, 2010).Fairness norms are the product of culture and hence learned. Yet there appears to be considerable biological support for such prosocial norms. Anger is a common response to unfairness, and there is evidence that when unfair situations are encountered, the same neural regions of the brain are stimulated as those associated with anger and disgust (Sanfey, Rillng, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003). Folger and Skarlicki (2005) use the term deontic anger (“moral outrage” in common parlance) to refer to angry reactions to unfairness. They hypothesize that deontic anger has its evolutionary roots in curtailing abuses of power. Boehm (2012) provides support for this view from an extensive review of the ethnographic literature of modern-day hunter-gatherer societies that are similar in nature to those in which modern man emerged in the Late Pleistocene. Of the 150 societies for which he found ethnographic records, every one shared egalitarian norms and political arrangements. Intolerance for unfairness, he suggests, even among third-parties not directly involved, arose historically in order to deal with the alpha-male who disrupts the egalitarian social order.Reciprocity. The norm of reciprocity refers to a behavioral strategy in which individuals respond in kind to the actions of others: they cooperate on condition that others do so, and punish others who do not cooperate. Ostrom enumerates five elements associated with reciprocity:

(1) an effort to identify who else is involved, (2) an assessment of the likelihood that others are conditional cooperators, (3) a decision to cooperate initially with others if others are trusted to be conditional cooperators, (4) a refusal to cooperate with those who do not reciprocate, and (5) punishment of those who betray trust. All reciprocity norms share the common ingredients that individuals tend to react to the positive actions of others with positive responses and the negative actions of others with negative responses. Reciprocity is a basic norm taught in all societies (see Becker 1990, Blau 1964, Gouldner 1960, Homans 1961, Oakerson 1993, V. Ostrom 1997, Thibaut and Kelley 1959). (1998, p. 10)

In perhaps the most well-known computer simulations in social science, Axelrod (1984) ran a computer tournament of alternative strategies to a repeated Prisoners Dilemma game, where strategies encoded as computer programs were solicited from game-theorists, mathematicians, and social scientists, and run against all other strategies in a series of round-robin computer simulations. Prisoners Dilemma is a 2-person social dilemma game in which, for each player, non-cooperation is a dominant strategy (i.e. its payoff is higher regardless of whether the other player cooperates). One strategy, a reciprocating strategy known as TIT-FOR-TAT (cooperate on the first play and on each subsequent play take the action that the other player did on the previous play), performed best in the tournament. That is, it received the highest aggregated payoff of any strategy. Even after publishing these results, re-soliciting new strategies, and running a new tournament, TIT-FOR-TAT was still the most successful strategy. In analyzing the results, Axelrod found that the reciprocity that TIT-FOR-TAT embeds has the following properties. First, it is forgiving, in that cooperation, once lost, can be easily be restored by the other player cooperating on their next round. Second, it is transparent, in that other players can predict what their payoffs will be based on their different actions when facing a player using TIT-FOR-TAT, thus contributing to social order. Third, it is modest, in that, due to initial cooperation, it


never receives a higher score than any player to which it is paired across multiple rounds, yet it wins the tournament as a whole because it accrues the benefits of cooperation from all players willing to reciprocate. Axelrod also ran a number of agent-based simulations using these different strategies, where strategies in one generation were replicated in the next in proportion to their rate of success against the other extant strategies. In doing so, he found that TIT-FOR-TAT is stable, since in a population with a sufficient number of reciprocators, it is resistant to invasion by individuals employing selfish strategies. In addition, it is emergent, in that, within a population primarily consisting of non-cooperators, even a relatively small proportion of reciprocators can, through the benefits of mutual cooperation, slowly come to replace non-cooperators and dominate the population.And there is overwhelming evidence from the behavioral lab that, when the rules permit, many people will punish others for free riding and rule violations, even at a cost to themselves (Bowles & Gintis, 2004; Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Gintis et al., 2005; Henrich et al., 2004; Thaler, 1992). Many people—those who have internalized norms of reciprocation and fairness—appear to receive positive intrinsic rewards for punishing, exercising this option even in one-shot social dilemma games when there is no possibility of altering the behavior of other players to increase cooperation (and hence joint payoffs) in the future (Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Gintis et al., 2005). “[F]ree riding causes strong negative emotions among cooperating subjects. Moreover, the pattern of emotional responses to free riding is consistent with the hypothesis that negative emotions trigger the willingness to punish” (Fehr & Gächter, 2000, p. 30). In short, people want to punish rule breakers, and receive emotional support for doing so.In commenting on the published literature on the Ultimatum Game in lab settings, Bowles et al. (2005) state: “The ultimatum game has been played around the world, but mostly with university students. ... Among student subjects, however, average performance is strikingly uniform from country to country. Behavior in the ultimatum game thus conforms to the strong reciprocity model: ‘fair’ behavior in the ultimatum game for college students is a fifty-fifty split. Responders reject offers less than forty percent as a form of altruistic punishment of the norm-violating proposer” (p. 12). In interviews with players post-game, responders indicate that they reject low offers in order to punish proposers, while many proposers indicate that they increased their offers for fear of their offer being rejected. This suggests why reciprocity is such a stable social norm: with a sufficient number of reciprocators in a population, reciprocators will cooperate with other reciprocators and thus receive the benefits of doing so, and those who might be tempted to be selfish will have external incentives to offer (and receive) fair amounts out of fear that their low offers will be rejected. Although reciprocity is a universal norm across cultures, not every individual employs it. In a variety of different experimental games related to reciprocity, there are often individuals who engage in self-regarding behavior. For example, in the Ultimatum game experiments cited above, individuals apply selfish strategies approximately 25% of the time (Gintis et al., 2005). In addition, there appear to be considerable individual differences in how tolerant reciprocators are (i.e. how long they will continue to cooperate) in the face of non-cooperation by others (Kahan, 2005). Few, however, will persist in the face of consistent non-cooperation by others. For example, Thaler (1992) reports on a series of iterated public goods games in which players contributed an average of 40-60% during the first round of play. Yet in subsequent rounds, contributions dramatically decreased due to the erosion of trust that others would reciprocate contributions to the public good: ‘‘after five trials, the contributions to the public good were only 16 percent of optimum’’ (p. 11). As Levi (1989) states, “No one prefers to be a ‘sucker’” (p. 53). Reciprocity, then, relies crucially on trust. “If individuals can be made to believe that others are inclined to contribute to public goods, they can be induced to contribute in turn, even without recourse to incentives” (Kahan, 2005, p. 343).


Trust and reputation. People who trust one another are more likely to cooperate. Kenneth Arrow (1974) points out that virtually every economic transaction is undergirded by trust. One significant gain from trust is that when parties trust one another, they can invest significantly fewer resources on ensuring compliance with agreements. “[T]rust works primarily at the interpersonal level to produce microlevel social order and to lower the costs of monitoring and sanctioning that might be required if individuals were not trustworthy” (Cook, Hardin, & Levi, 2005, p. 1). The concept of trust has been defined in numerous ways among philosophers, social scientists, and behavioral scientists (reviewed in Cook et al., 2005; R. Hardin, 1996). I adopt here Cook, Hardin, and Levi’s (2005) conception of trust: that trust is a relation between specific individuals: “Trust exists when one party to the relation believes the other party has incentive to act in his or her interest or to take his or her interests to heart” (p. 2). Questions of trust arise only in particular situations. Gambetta and Hamill (2005) describe a trust situation as one in which the trusted could act otherwise and has short-term self-interest to do so. When A trusts B in situation S, we say that A judges B to be trustworthy in S (Cook et al., 2005). Evaluations of trust and trustworthiness, then, are interpersonal, “grounded in specific evaluations of the actors involved, the nature of the issues at stake, and the social context” (Cook et al., 2005, p. 15). Trust is not a moral disposition or personality trait (though it can be influenced by both) but a contingent and interpersonal relation relative to a particular matter at hand. Trust depends on the nature of the relationship that individuals have with one another and their beliefs about one another’s values and interests, based on repeated interactions from the past. “Repeated interaction forms the primary basis for trust” (Cook et al., 2005, p. 32). The fact that situations repeat, that individuals can (and often do) interact over an extended time, shapes the dynamics of trust and cooperation, which I return to in the next section. But as Cook, Hardin, and Levi (2005) inquire, how does a trust relation develop in the first place, particularly when there is little or no information about the exchange partner? To gain insight into this question, Gambetta and Hamill (2005) report on a study of taxi drivers in Northern Ireland and New York City. Driving a taxi is one of the most dangerous professions in the world, with few repeated interactions and the need to make snap judgments about trustworthiness. The authors report that initial assessments of trustworthiness are based on personal and contextual cues that signal the trustworthiness of the other person. One class of such cues are “cultural stereotypes and schemata [that] fill in for the details we are missing in our efforts to evaluate others” (Cook et al., 2005, p. 28), which provide heuristic benefit under conditions of uncertainty and tight time constraints. Individuals also use assessments of similarity to self as another heuristic for choosing exchange partners. Making similarity assessments is sometimes based on group affiliation. Group members display signs of membership through what Dunbar (1999) calls badging, “the use of culturally generated external signals of group membership” (p. 200) that include such things as skin markings, hair styles, and forms of dress.Another way in which trust can be bootstrapped is by strong social networks and the social capital that accrues in such networks. "Social networks allow trust to become transitive and spread: I trust you, because I trust her and she assures me that she trusts you" (Putnam, 1993, p. 169). Examples of this kind of networked-based trust-building are microfinance groups (Armendáriz & Morduch, 2010) and revolving credit societies (Cook et al., 2005; Putnam, 1993), in which small, select groups of individuals who are normally denied access to credit from the formal banking system mutually commit to provide one another with economic capital in the form of loans, with the understanding that such capital will be repaid to the group on an ongoing basis. But there are a number of reasons why trust may not arise. First is that honest actors are alert to the fact that signals can be faked, especially if they are not costly to generate, and thus may require particularly strong signals of trust to enter into a trust relation, biased by recent experiences of having trust betrayed (Gambetta & Hamill, 2005). Experimental


evidence indicates that such group characteristics as language dialects evolved within homogeneous groups precisely because they are so difficult to mimic (Dunbar, 1999). Another threat to trust is misinterpretation of the signals of others, particularly when there are large cultural or language differences between the actors (Gambetta & Hamill, 2005). Inaccurate stereotypes and categorizations can also reduce the chances of trust emerging (Gambetta & Hamill, 2005). Because of the high likelihood of error in such initial interpersonal assessments, establishing relations of trust crucially depends on the embedding social context: the continuity of daily interactions in the workplace, the informal social networks that quickly propagate gossip and reputational information (Cook et al., 2005). Yet breakdowns in trust are not uniformly negative; unwarranted trust may lead to betrayal and exploitation. And because of this possibility, particular institutional mechanisms can be put in place to increase the likelihood that trust will emerge and be sustained, to compensate for the lack of interpersonal or reputational information and reduce dependence on premature stereotyped or similarity-based trust judgments that may lead to cycles of mistrust (Cook et al., 2005). To anticipate our discussion below, these institutional mechanisms can include such things as increasing repeatability, enhancing the information that actors have about one another, and third-party sanctions. As Cook et al. (2005) point out, cooperation can thus emerge in the absence of trust, where institutions provide the structural, contextual basis by which trust can emerge.Given recent advances in transportation and communication technologies, individuals are increasingly engaging in exchange and interaction with strangers, many of them one-shot, where considerable opportunity for opportunism and exploitation exists. “[O]ne-shot interactions between anonymous partners in a global market become increasingly frequent and tend to replace the traditional long-lasting associations and exchanges based on repeated give and take between relatives, neighbours, or members of the same village” (Nowak & Sigmund, 2005, p. 1291). In such cases, neither a history of past interaction nor the threat of retaliation in the future can be relied upon for predicting or ensuring cooperation. Reputation, however, can serve instead, and can be viewed as a proxy for the entire history of interactions by an individual with all others within a network of information-sharing individuals. Reputational information becomes a precious resource for individuals in a variety of interactional settings because others use it to determine whether to enter into agreements in the first place, or to engage in reciprocal cooperation (Basu, Dickhaut, Hecht, Towry, & Waymire, 2009). In addition, with repeated interactions, actors recognize the value of their own reputation, and have strong incentives to continue to act so as to protect a reputation of trustworthiness (Ostrom & Walker, 2003). “[T]he value of a reputation for trustworthiness is that it gives one incentive to actually be trustworthy” (Cook et al., 2005, p. 85). Ostrom (2003) notes that trust, reputation, and reciprocity are mutually reinforcing as people interact with one another on an ongoing basis. “[A]t the core of a behavioral explanation [of interactional behavior in social dilemmas] are the links between the trust that an individual has in others, the investment others make in trustworthy reputations, and the probability of using reciprocity norms” (pp. 49–50). If you have a reputation for trustworthy behavior and exhibit norms of reciprocity, then I am likely to trust you, and similarly for your evaluations of me. These mutual evaluations of trustworthiness will encourage us to enter into agreements. Our continuing effort to protect our respective reputations, coupled with internalized norms of reciprocity will lead us to fulfill our obligations, which increases our trust in one another. But if I have reason to believe that you do not value having a trustworthy reputation, or I think that you have not internalized reciprocity norms, then I am not likely to trust you. And this distrust will be exhibited in my unwillingness to make commitments and to pay the costs of reciprocation, leading to your distrust of me.


The above principles highlight some of the important research that has emerged in the last several decades that provide an alternative account of individual decision-making in social settings than that provided by the theory of rational self-interest. Yet a considerable amount of research has focused on another set of variables related to cooperation: those structural features of the interactional setting that are associated with cooperation, to which I now turn.

3. b Structural Features That Affect CooperationIn using the term “structural,” I mean to highlight that these characteristics of situations are those that are subject to institutional design. That is, these are features that are partially produced by the rules under which the participants operate. They can thus be thought of as exogenous to the actors in any particular moment in time, although over time the participants themselves can alter the rules that structure their interactions. Note as well that rules and rule-making exist at multiple levels, where some rules pertain to such things as the allocation of work by the individuals of a collective (what Ostrom, 2005, calls the operational level), or rules related to the enforcement of rules or to determining who can be involved in making rules (what Ostrom, 2005, calls collective choice and constitutional levels). These structural features most pertinent to educational groupwork are face-to-face communication, rule enforcement, participant involvement in rule-making, and repeatability of group-based interactions.Face-to-face communication. One of the key results that has recently emerged from the behavioral lab is the importance of a single structural element for increasing joint returns in social dilemmas: face to face communication. In a multi-round resource-sharing game reported in (Ostrom, Walker, & Gardner, 1992) in which participants were not allowed to communicate, individuals employed non-cooperative strategies far below the optimal return that might have resulted with higher levels of cooperation. Yet there were dramatic increases in returns when participants played an identical game with the only change that they talked with one another before each round of play. In his conclusion from a meta-analysis of over 100 studies involving over 5,000 participants in social dilemma games over a 35 year period, Sally (1995) asserts that the opportunity for face to face conversation is the single most important variable influencing the likelihood of cooperation, with gains averaging 40% more than groups were able to achieve without communication in settings with repeated interactions. And Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker (1994) provide references to a large number of empirical studies demonstrating the importance of communication for cooperation in social dilemmas. These results contradict long held beliefs among social scientists that “cheap talk” alone will have no effect on collective action, since, under an assumption that Hobbes (1651) makes explicit: “the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power” (p. 84).Speech itself has normative force in the context of collective action, and it appears to do so for two primary reasons: making joint commitments, and enforcing these commitments and general social norms. Language is uniquely suited to allow participants to make mutual commitments to carry out joint goals, what Hobbes (1651) calls convenants and Tomasello (2005, 2009; following Searle, 1999, and Tuomela, 2007) calls “we” intentions, e.g. “we will meet at noon for two hours to work on our group project.” Nesse (2001) defines commitment in this future-constraining sense as “an act or signal that gives up options in order to influence someone’s behavior by changing incentives or expectations” (p. 13). Ostrom (1998) comments on observing exactly this kind of mutual commitment among participants in social dilemma situations in the lab: "Subjects in experiments do try to extract mutual commitment from one another to follow the strategy they have identified as leading to their best joint outcomes. They frequently go around the group and ask each person to promise the others that they will follow the joint strategy” (p. 7). It appears that for many people the act of making joint commitments carries with it a strong internal


motivation to carry out the commitment, and that this normative sentiment arises developmentally quite early in life.

[O]nce people have formed a joint goal, they feel committed to it: They know that opting out will harm or disappoint the others, and they act in ways that prevent this. … For instance, when working jointly with a partner on a task that should result in both actors receiving a reward, 3.5-year-olds continue to work until the partner has received his reward even if they have already received their own reward earlier in the process (Hamann et al. 2012). Moreover, when 3-year-olds need to break away from a joint commitment with a partner, they do not simply walk away but ‘take leave’ from the other as a way of acknowledging and asking to be excused for breaking the commitment (Gräfenhain et al. 2009). (Tomasello & Vaish, 2013, p. 241)

Language is also a low-cost mechanism for signaling disapproval of the violation of agreements or social norms through such acts as “an admonishment, a bit of gossip, or ridicule—all of which may have particular salience when conveyed by a neighbor or a workmate whom one is accustomed to call one of ‘us’ rather than ‘them’” (Bowles & Gintis, 2005, p. 384). In a colorful example from one of their lab experiments, Ostrom et al. report (1994) on the use of a “tongue lashing” between rounds of play to punish another player who violated prior resource-sharing agreements: “some scumbucket is investing more than we agreed upon” (p. 160). Language is also central to the process of “group shaming” (Boehm, 2012). Abigail Barr (2001) reports on a field experiment carried out in thirteen communities in rural Zimbabwe, where participants (354 in total) played four rounds of a public goods game with others from their same village for stakes equivalent to one day’s wage. The first two games were played anonymously, while the third was played publicly (i.e. all choices by each player were publicly announced), followed by a discussion session where the participants were asked to comment on one another’s contribution choices. Following this, a fourth round was publicly played. In all thirteen communities, low contributions attracted light-hearted criticisms (‘Now I know why I never get offered food when I drop by your house!’; p. 11), and low contributors, whether criticized directly or overhearing the criticism of others, increased their contributions in the subsequent round. In addition, subsequent cooperation was lower within those communities who failed to use these shame-based verbal sanctions for low contributions.Rule enforcement: monitoring and sanctioning. Despite the deontic force of covenants and internalized norms of reciprocity and fairness, compliance is not guaranteed; people break promises, commitments go unfulfilled, and self-interest will sometimes outweigh regard for others. What gives rules “teeth” is their enforcement, requiring both monitoring rule compliance, and sanctioning those who are non-compliant. Monitoring, however, is costly to perform, particularly by third parties, and there is the additional possibility for monitors to be paid off to turn a blind eye on non-compliance. One way that communities reduce the costs associated with monitoring is by carrying it out in a mutual fashion, or to hire monitors from within the group of participants within the social dilemma situation who are accountable to the group (Ostrom, 1990). One example comes from small land-holders in the dry Valencia region of Spain who have established a highly successful system for determining water allocation among the different farmers sharing irrigation water diverted from the nearby Turia river, called the turno system (Maass & Anderson, 1978). During most times of the year, turn taking occurs in “flow order” from the head to the tail of the irrigation canal. When it is an individual’s turn, he or she is permitted to take as much water as needed, as long as none is wasted. If they miss their turn, then they must wait for their turn in the next cycle of water diversion. Levels of monitoring are extremely high, performed principally by the farmer whose turn comes next in sequence. Monitoring cost per farmer is low, both because monitoring is distributed among all farmers sharing the canal, and because each farmer only needs to monitor the preceding farmer in the turno.


A second way in which communities reduce enforcement costs is by exposing rule breakers to the entire community, which is sometimes sufficient for securing compliance, even in the absence of sanction. In a study of different groundwater governance systems in Southern California, Blomquist (1992) provides examples of self-governance arrangements among different water pumpers sharing the same water basin. Effective governance arrangements are particularly important with this resource, since overdrawing the aquifers so close to the ocean can result in salt-water intrusion that can despoil the system permanently. One of the key rules associated with compliance among the different self-governance arrangements is regular reporting among the pumpers of who was not complying with their agreed on rules. ‘‘Although the institutional arrangements have been in effect in Raymond Basin for nearly 50 years and in Orange County for 40 years, sanctions have never been applied for non-compliance. When instances of non-compliance with rules requiring meter installations, meter repairs, payment of contributions, or restrictions on water withdrawals have occurred, reporting of the violation has sufficed to bring about compliance in the next time period without the application of sanctions [emphasis added]’’ (Ostrom et al., 1994, p. 297). This is an example of what Wade (1987) calls transparency in institutional arrangements, the mutual knowledge that all actors have of one another’s behavior with respect to their covenants. Wade notes that many social dilemmas are situations of contingent cooperation, where, out of fear of being suckered (complying when others do not), individuals take an “I will if you will” position. Thus, voluntary compliance requires ongoing information about whether others are also complying.Despite the importance of monitoring, sanctions are nonetheless important so as to obtain high rule compliance in many collective action settings. In a comparative study of 47 communities with shared irrigation systems from around the world, Ostrom et al. (1994) report that 80% of communities with guards had high compliance rates while in only 36% of the communities without guards was there high rule compliance. And in a series of lab experiments, Ostrom et al. (1992) compared actions and outcomes in social dilemma games designed to explore the importance of sanctions in enforcing covenants. The researchers looked at behavior in a high-stakes social dilemma game comparing the following conditions: (a) no communication and no sanctioning, (b) communication but no sanctioning, (c) no communication but sanctioning, and (d) communication and sanctioning. When the players interacted without communication or sanctions, their aggregate payoffs were only 21% of the maximum possible; with communication but no sanctions, they received 55% of the maximum possible; sanctions without communication resulted in 37% of the maximum; and communication with sanctions resulted in 93% of the maximum possible. They conclude “[T]hese experiments suggest that covenants, even without a sword, have some force, while swords without a covenant may be worse than the state of nature. Best of all are the conditions we examined are covenants with an internal sword, freely chosen or made available as an institutional option” (p. 414). And in a series of public goods experiments that compared punishment to no-punishment conditions, Fehr and Gächter (2000) conclude: “The more an individual negatively deviates from the contributions of the other group members the heavier is the punishment. … Very high or even full cooperation can be achieved and maintained in the punishment condition whereas the same subjects converge towards full defection in the no-punishment condition” (p. 29).Punishment, however, is far from a panacea, and it must be exercised with considerable care in order to be effective. First, in her study of hundreds of successful resource-using communities, Ostrom (1990) reports that communities are never too heavy-handed in administering sanctions, instead starting with light punishments (sometimes only a warning), with punishment increasing only with repeated rule breaking. Second, who punishes can be as important as whether punishment occurs. In the study of irrigation systems cited above (Ostrom et al., 1994), the researchers compared systems that were farmer-managed to those that were government-managed. Fourteen of the farmer-managed systems hired local farmers as guards, often working part-time and sometimes


without pay, and all but one of these had high rule compliance. Eleven farmer-managed systems had no guards, with 45% having rule compliance. Eleven of the government-managed systems had guards, most of whom were non-local government employees, with 64% of these systems having high rule compliance. None of the three government-managed systems without guards had high rule compliance. There appear to be two interlocking factors at work. One is that local guards were empowered to—and did—levy sanctions immediately on catching a rule breaker, while bureaucratic rules often prevented immediate sanctioning with government-hired guards. Local accountability and legitimacy also appears to be a factor: no government managed community without guards had high rule compliance, while almost half of the farmer managed communities without guards nonetheless had high rule compliance.Third, there is considerable empirical research that punishments (as well as rewards) can sometimes lead to exactly the opposite behavior that they are administered to achieve (Deci et al., 1999; Frey & Jegen, 2000), what is often called crowding theory. This is because when punishments are perceived as controlling, or reframe the interaction from a moral basis to a material one, people are less likely to self-regulate. To take one of the most widely reported studies that demonstrates this crowding effect, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000) describe a study of several Israeli daycare centers in which a fine was introduced in order to penalize parents who picked up their children late. The surprising result is that the number of late-coming parents on average doubled after the introduction of the fine, and remained at this level even after the fine was removed. As the authors point out, this result is intelligible if the parents operated from an implicit norm that in the absence of payment, one should try to minimize the burden on daycare workers who voluntarily stay overtime (a moral reason), while if paid, these same workers are perceived as receiving a fair exchange for their time (a material reason). Payment thus crowds out self-regulating behavior, supplanting an ethically-based motivation with a materially-based one. A meta-analysis of studies relating to crowding theory by Frey and Jegen (2000) reports convincing evidence that externally-administered punishments and rewards crowd out intrinsic motivations and other-regarding behavior in areas as diverse as the provisioning of volunteer labor, the use of incentives by management in organizational settings, the siting of nuclear waste repositories, the regulation of tropical forests, and the rate of citizen compliance with paying taxes. Their conclusion from this analysis is that “External interventions crowd out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling. In that case, both self-determination and self-esteem suffer, and the individuals react by reducing their intrinsic motivation in the activity controlled” (pp. 594–5). However, they also report on the existence of “crowding in,” when punishments can increase cooperation and intrinsic motivation. “External interventions crowd in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive. In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self- determination” (p. 595). As reported earlier, punishments are seen as supportive when the institutions that give rise to them are viewed as fair and legitimate, even when individuals are themselves the targets of this punishment (Tyler, 2010). As indicated in the next section, institutions are more likely to be perceived as fair if participants are involved in creating them.To summarize, the use of punishments in human interactions is crucially important, but requires considerable care in order to have its desired effect. When participants view punishments as legitimate and fair, they are likely to increase self-regulation and regard for others. This is particularly the case when participants themselves are primarily responsible for monitoring and punishing, which they can do at relatively low cost compared to external 3rd parties. Individuals are motivated to punish free riders in proportion to their deviation from fairness norms, intrinsically supported by social emotions. But such punishments are never all-or-nothing, instead being light for first infractions and increasing only with repeated non-compliance.


Participant involvement in creating institutions. In many real-world settings, participants in social dilemmas are subject to rules that have been put in place by individuals far removed from the specifics of the interactional setting. These might include such things as limiting harvest or production, restricting access to resources, or specifying sanctions for non-compliance. Because they operate at a distance, many 3rd party rule makers will have inaccurate perceptions of the local norms and culture of participants, the history of interactions and evolved de facto rights that are recognized, and the specifics of the material world that local participants have adapted themselves to over time. All of these can lead to considerable non-compliance or poor performance by participants even when they follow the rules.On the other hand, participants on the ground in social dilemma situations have considerable local knowledge that can inform the rule making concerning required, prohibited, and permissible behavior. Not only are direct participants often able to monitor other people’s levels of effort and performance with relative ease, but they acquire expertise about the complexities of the situation that they are facing, whether it is the specifics of a local environmental resource (such as a forest or fishery), or a valued public service such as policing within a particular neighborhood or primary school education within their local community. Considerable empirical research indicates that cooperation is significantly enhanced when local participants are closely involved in the rule making associated with their action arena (Ostrom, 1990). Not only does this increase intrinsic motivation to comply with agreed on rules, but helps to legitimize sanctions that might end up being applied to those who are non-compliant. In addition, participation in building new institutions signals to conditional cooperators that other participants are willing to invest in the common good, thereby increasing their confidence that cooperation will be reciprocated (Gintis et al., 2005).Repeatability: the shadow of the future. Another important structural feature of an interactional situation is if participants have repeated interactions with one another over an extended period of time, and believe that they are likely to have interactions in the future. There are two primary reasons why repeatability and time impact behavior: the incentive and opportunity to craft institutions to better fit the situational constraints, and a sufficient number of interactions to increase the payoffs associated with long-term cooperation and to maintain a reputation for trustworthiness. In non-repeated situations, participants have little reason to expend effort to craft situation-specific institutions that might help to regulate conduct within the setting. These institutions can affect who can participate, the roles and role responsibilities, the constraints on actions or outcomes, the information that participants are required to provide to one another, and the payoffs associated with different actions or outcomes (Ostrom, 2005). Without sufficient time, the benefit associated with better collective performance as a result of these institutions cannot be amortized over time. Such institutions take considerable investments of time and resources to craft and enforce, what economists and political scientists refer to as transaction costs (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1998). In addition, participants may have insufficient experience with the interactional setting to learn best how to structure their interactions. Because institutions are themselves public goods from which everyone benefits, the crafting and enforcing of institutions present a second-order public goods dilemma (Ostrom, 1990), with its attendant risks of free riders who do not wish to pay the transaction costs. And yet, as Ostrom (1990) demonstrates through comparative analysis of hundreds of field studies of long-enduring resource sharing communities across the globe, communities with a sufficiently long time horizon and stable population will invest significantly in creating and enforcing institutions, and adapting them to achieve better performance over time. Repeatability thus gives a sufficient horizon of future interaction for amortizing the investment associated with institution building and maintenance.


Second, in a world of strangers and one-shot interactions, there is a large temptation to exploit others who have no opportunity for future retaliation. When group members anticipate future interactions, the very existence of this imagined future can alter choices made in the present, what Axelrod (1984) calls “the shadow of the future.” “What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again. This possibility means that the choice made today not only determines the outcome of this move, but can also influence the later choices of the players. The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present and thereby affect the current strategic situation” (p. 12). Not only does repetition allow for the aggregation of cooperative gains over time, but it also creates incentives to individuals to expend effort to maintain a reputation for trustworthiness. I may sufficiently value the ongoing relationship between us that I act in ways so as to maintain this trust. Thus, regardless of whether an individual has strong internalized norms for behaving in a trustworthy way, the shadow of the future provides an additional incentive for cooperation. But repeatability does not automatically lead to higher cooperation, because repeated situations also provide the opportunity for one to find out that other participants in a social dilemma are uncooperative and untrustworthy. Despite the high contributions roughly half of individuals exhibit in one-shot public goods games, as reported above, this cooperative behavior degrades significantly when these games are repeated without the possibility for communication or punishment (Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Ostrom et al., 1992; Thaler, 1992). Thus, repeatability is a two-edged sword, enabling both vicious and virtuous circles; vicious, in that most people’s willingness to be exploited is limited, and virtuous, in that most will invest in institution-building, in maintaining a reputation for trustworthiness, and in capturing the benefits of cooperation over the long-term, as long as others are also acting cooperatively and there is sufficient time and repeated interaction to realize the long-term gains of cooperation (Putnam, 1993).

4. DISCUSSIONThe theory presented above takes cooperation not as something that can be assumed, but as a contingent aspect of human interaction, never knowable in advance. The specific principles presented can serve as heuristics that can be used by educational researchers for accounting for or predicting cooperation, and by instructional designers for developing policies for student groupwork that increase the likelihood that cooperation will result. Table 2 summarizes these results in the form of a set of questions that can guide an analyst's inquiries related to the individual, relational, and institutional structure of a setting in which groupwork is used. These questions are descriptive in nature, and it is from these descriptive characterizations of the research setting that accounts or predictions might be made. As an example of prediction, consider a setting in which students have little past history with one another, there is no repeatability (e.g. the teacher assigns a group assignment with a single deadline and no opportunities for formative feedback on the assignment), few explicit shared norms concerning reciprocity, and no requirements (including in-class time) to meet face to face. Under these conditions, the above theory suggests that in several groups, free riding will occur and there will be breakdowns in trust among the members. This is not a determinate inference, however, as there might be additional factors that mitigate the negative effects of a one-shot situation and little to no opportunities for the students to make and enforce commitments. If, for example, a group of students is successful at achieving a productive groupwork experience that promotes learning under the above conditions, then the principles above can be used retrospectively as a basis for trying to account for this success. So, for example, it may be that this group agrees to meet weekly, makes explicit commitments about who is to do which parts of the joint work that are documented and agreed to by all, explicitly strives for equitable distribution of work, and mutually monitors one another's fulfillment of these commitments. That is, the variables that are highlighted in these principles (fairness, reciprocity, trust, reputation, face to face communication, monitoring, sanctioning,


institution-building, repeatability) can serve as the initial areas of focus from which to build such an account.Important sources for an analyst to examine are the institutions that are made explicit and public within the setting. These might include such things as handouts that teachers provide, discussions about appropriate behavior, and policies describing how grades will be assigned. What is the form of these institutional statements? That is, how will an analyst recognize institutions in the field? Given the number of theorists who have used institutional language, it should come as no surprise that the terms used to describe institutions (e.g. policy, law, rule, norm, strategy, convention, among others) are not defined or used in uniform ways across the researchers cited in this review. Ostrom (2005) attempts to bring some order to what she calls a “babbling equilibrium” (p. 176) of terminology by providing a set of clear definitions and distinctions for institutions, which she takes as sets of rules and norms. She states that rules can be expressed as statements composed of the following five elements: attribute, deontic, aim, condition, and or else. The attribute indicates the group of social actors for whom the rule applies; the deontic is one of may, must, or must not; the aim is the aspect of human activity or social and material outcomes that the institutional statement refers to; the condition states when a rule applies, and the or else designates the punishment incurred for non-compliance with the rule. Norms are identical to rules, except they do not include the or else. This is not to say that norms are unenforced; rather, rules, in addition to specifying the or else, are in constellations of other rules that include additional constitutive and regulatory rules defining specific social roles with the responsibilities for enforcing particular rules. Norms have no such additional rules related to enforcement.To illustrate this “institutional grammar,” consider the following rule used (among others) for structuring student groupwork drawn from the case study described by Tenenberg (2008): “All students are required to meet weekly, face to face with their group for a minimum of 1.5 hours” (p. 491). The attribute is “all students” (enrolled in the course), the deontic is must (“are required to”), the aim is “to meet weekly, face to face with their group for a minimum of 1.5 hours”, the condition, though not stated explicitly is “each week after groups have been formed until the end of the academic term”, and the or else, stated in the course syllabus (and hence implicit within this statement) is “you will receive a penalty of at least 10% on your individual grade for the groupwork.”When doing institutional analysis, it is also important to keep in mind Ostrom's (2005) distinction between rules-in-use and rules-in-form. "Many written statements have the form of a rule (or a norm ...) but are not known to participants and do not affect behavior. Such statements are considered rules-in-form rather than rules-in-use (Sproule-Jones 1993). We concentrate our attention here on rules-in-use" (p. 155). That is, it is important for the researcher to try to uncover the rules that are actually used than those that exist but are either unknown or never followed. The following excerpt from John Irving's (1986) Cider House Rules highlights this distinction. “Homer pulled the tack out of the wall and would have crumpled the paper and tossed it toward the trash barrel if the top line of type hadn't caught his attention. CIDER HOUSE RULES the top line said. ‘What rules?’ he wondered, reading down the page. The rules were numbered. ... Homer handed the torn paper to Big Dot Taft. ... ‘Anyway, nobody pays attention to them rules,’ Big Dot Taft said. ‘Every year Olive writes them up, and every year nobody pays no attention’” (pp. 281–2). In other words, the norms and rules of interest within a research setting are the ones that are made public, generally followed, and enforced. Often, rules and norms are only visible (or audible) in their breach, when actors within the setting sanction others for violating the rules or norms.Many of the questions in Table 2 can also be used by the instructional designer in developing policies (i.e. rules and norms) for structuring groupwork within the educational setting. In this case, the questions are used proscriptively rather than descriptively. So, for example, the instructional designer might develop a set of normative statements that


indicate expectations for student behavior within groups, e.g. “treat groupmates with respect in speech and manner.” As another example, the instructional designer might require students to make, document, publicly display, and monitor work commitments on a weekly basis. Note, however, that not all of the questions can be used proscriptively, such as “Do students have a past history in making mutual commitments and working together?” However, the skilled designer might nonetheless try to take account these background characteristics of students and setting to develop institutions that are fit to context

4. a ConclusionIn this paper, I have framed educational groupwork as having essential characteristics similar to that of herders sharing a commons and citizens sharing a polity: having students work in groups inherently creates a social dilemma between individual and collective interest. ‘‘All efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems. These have to do with coping with free riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules’’ (Ostrom, 1990, p. 27). Unless this dilemma is solved in favor of group interest, students will withhold cooperation, and the benefits that might accrue from working together will be reduced or lost. Framing groupwork as involving a social dilemma has the advantage that it makes available an emerging set of theoretical principles from across the social and behavioral sciences related to the motivations that underlie human decision making and action, and the structural conditions that facilitate and hinder cooperation. Classical solutions to social dilemmas from political science fall on two ends of a spectrum between individualizing what had previously been held in common, or using centralized, coercive power to enforce pro-social agreements, such as contributions to a public good. And such classical solutions are tacitly embedded in many of the current approaches to student groupwork in education, by either abandoning groupwork in favor of purely individualized student work, or placing group activity under the sole surveillance and sanctioning authority of the teacher. Both of these approaches rest on the assumption that people are motivated primarily by self-interest: if individualized, they will look after their own interests, and if in teacher-managed groups they will cooperate under the threat of teacher-imposed sanctions.Research from the last several decades, however, is providing considerable insight that both challenges the assumption of homo economicus while at the same time offering a set of principles that suggest a wider range of institutional arrangements are possible for structuring collective action situations. A growing body of empirical evidence from the behavioral lab and field studies indicates that fairness and reciprocity norms are taught across cultures, and that a majority of individuals adopt these norms in practice in a wide variety of human interactions. In addition, individuals expend considerable effort in building networks of trust and in maintaining reputations for trustworthiness.But because fairness and reciprocity are not universally internalized and practiced, institutional mechanisms are also important factors in creating the external conditions for the emergence of cooperation. These include repeated opportunities for face to face communication and collective action. Such opportunities enable the participants to make explicit commitments toward the common good, and to monitor and sanction one another at relatively low cost for failing to uphold these commitments. In addition, such face to face opportunities provide key conditions for the participants to create new institutional arrangements that are better suited to their emerging understanding of one another and the context of activity, particularly when the group can anticipate a sufficiently long lifespan together so as to amortize the cost of institution building.Groupwork in education is important, not only for the technical and disciplinary knowledge that collective activity enables. In addition, most educators also want students to develop


as citizens within a polity who are not solely self-serving, or compliant rule-followers, but active participants in the democratic production of civic life. But how will they learn the practices and habits of democratic participation if their educational settings provide no opportunities for this learnaing, remaining at one or the other pole of solely privatized instruction or centralized teacher control? This concern becomes particularly pressing as students move from their early years to their later ones, where increasing amounts of their work takes place outside the gaze of the teacher.Citizen participation is presented as contacting leaders, organizing interest groups and parties, and voting. That citizens need additional skills and knowledge to resolve the social dilemmas they face is left unaddressed. Their moral decisions are not discussed. We are producing generations of cynical citizens with little trust in one another, much less in their governments. Given the central role of trust in solving social dilemmas, we may be creating the very conditions that undermine our own democratic ways of life. It is ordinary persons and citizens who craft and sustain the workability of the institutions of everyday life. We owe an obligation to the next generation to carry forward the best of our knowledge about how individuals solve the multiplicity of social dilemmas—large and small—that they face. (Ostrom, 1998, p. 18) The principles of cooperation theory provided in this paper provide resources that instructional designers, researchers, teaching practitioners, and administrators can use in helping students engage in the “workability of the institutions of everyday life” as enacted in the social microcosm of the classroom.


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Tables

Table 1Number Of Hits From Searches In Major Academic Databases

Database:

Search terms:

ERIC Academic Search

Complete

EconLit Business Source

Complete

Google Scholar

“collective action problem” 2 1,181 84 1,181 15,800“social dilemma” 31 1,158 131 1,118 16,000“social loafing” 40 557 8 1,018 9,080“free riding” 36 3,721 917 6,823 74,900(All searches carried out on June 26, 2013)


Table 2Summary Questions To Guide Research And Design For GroupworkInternalized norms What are the behavioral norms displayed and enacted by students?

What norms are made public in enclosing units, such as the school? How do these norms vary between individuals?

Fairness How transparent are the procedures and policies related to groupwork from the instructor about such things as group assignment, specification of work, and assessment?

How is effort distributed among the students in a group, and how are benefits from groupwork distributed to the members of the group?

Trust Do students have past history in working together? Are there existing networks of trust among the students? How are these related to specific groupwork policies? In what way do relations of trust change over time, i.e. with increasing

interaction between the students?Reputation Over how long a period have these students known one another?

Is there accurate reputational information available to students concerning past and/or current performance, especially as related to the making and keeping of commitments toward groupwork and groupmates in this or other courses?

In what way can students use reputational information in making choices concerning future commitments?

Face to face communication

Are there policies related to groups having face to face communication? Do students make explicit commitments when meeting? Is there policy related to making and documenting commitments?

Rule enforcement How is the monitoring of compliance with shared norms and rules carried out, and by whom?

How is sanctioning for non-compliance carried out, and by whom? Does sanctioning incrementally increase with repeated infractions? In what way is monitoring and sanctioning related to specific policies?

Participant involvement in creating institutions

Who sets policies related to which aspects of group activity? In particular, what facets of groupwork (and the policies that govern this

work) do student groups have control over?Repeatability Over how long a period is the groupwork enacted?

How many times is the work evaluated by the instructor? Over how long a period will students anticipate being involved with one

another beyond the boundaries of this particular course or assignment?

the dilemma of cooperation in student...

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