Jan. 21, 2005 -- Personalities can make or break a group, and now researcher
Jan. 21, 2005 -- Personalities can make or break a group, and now researchers may know why. It all comes down to three personalities -- cooperators, free riders, and reciprocators.
Cooperators are the first to step up to the plate. They give to the group almost immediately, even if it's not certain that their efforts will be rewarded.
Free riders are at the other end of the spectrum. They chip in far less than anyone else, coasting on the contributions of others.
Reciprocators split the difference. They take a "wait and see" approach, hanging back until it's clear that they'll serve their own best interest by helping out the team.
Intentions aside, most of us are reciprocators, say Robert Kurzban and Daniel Houser. Kurzban works in the University of Pennsylvania's psychology department. Houser is with George Mason University's Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science.
Their study appears in the early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's based on tests with 84 University of Arizona undergraduates.
What Would You Do?
The experiment might stump even Donald Trump's Apprentice candidates. There was no way to smooth-talk your way around the task or to blame others for shortcomings.
Instead, participants sat in cubicles by themselves. They played a public goods game using "voluntary contribution" to learn about the types of personalities the subjects had. They took the test via computer. Each person received 50 tokens per game, which they could keep for themselves or give to the group. Participants could save or give any amount of tokens. Here's the catch: The group pot was split evenly among group members no matter how much a person contributed, and no one knew how long each game would last. Some were long; others, brief.
Everyone had two chances to invest their tokens -- at the game's start and after seeing what others had given to the group. Contributions to the group were randomly revealed to each participant once per game.
Personality Strategies
Some people -- the cooperators -- contributed tokens right away to the group. They were few, making up about 17% of all participants.
Others hoarded their tokens, giving less than anyone else. They were the free riders, accounting for 20% of the students.
That left the reciprocators. They put tokens in the group pot only if they were fairly sure they'd profit from it, based on what everyone else was doing. Reciprocators were the biggest group, with 63% of all participants.
The personalities were stable; people didn't change their stripes. On average, participants earned about $20 in the 90-minute experiment. Not surprisingly, groups with lots of cooperators tended to earn more.
Group outcomes can be remarkably predicted, say the researchers, if one knows its type of composition.
Even one person can make a big difference, say the researchers.
"For example, three reciprocators when grouped with a cooperator can expect to earn about 40% more than when they are grouped with a free-rider," write the researchers.
Kurzban and Houser are already working to see if the results are similar in other cultures. They also want to know how those personalities evolved.
