Reflection #6

ECON 490 LA Prompt for Reflection #6
We've used the term opportunism, taking advantage of the a situation, and a different term, being a good citizen, doing the right thing even when there is a opportunity to do otherwise, as to different sorts of possible behavior at work (or at school).  In this post we want to talk about environments that promote one or the other.  And we will do so taking a bit of an interdisciplinary approach.  To get the requisite background, I'd like you to read these two recent pieces from the NY Times

How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles
How Companies Learn Your Secrets

The first piece is about cooperative activity that subsequently promotes sharing.  The second is actually mainly about habits and habit formation.  I would like you to transfer the lessons from these pieces to your own work or school experience.  Can you give an example where cooperation has led to sharing?  Can you give a different example, where what might seem to some observers as opportunism was really the consequence of a bad habit?    Might there then be a solution in modifying the habit as in the second piece?


"Sharing is Caring"
The experiment outlined in the sharing article has an excellent explanation for a "sharing button" along with a total of 3 types of sharing conditions, and I believe it is surprisingly accurate.  I think the notions of sharing, finders keepers, or pullers keepers are experienced from a very young age.  In kindergarten, kids are put into classes with others to learn, play, and make friends.  There are surely many toys available for the kids, but multiples of the same toy may be nonexistent.  We can consider kids playing in a sandbox, where the shovel and bucket pairing is the most coveted toy.  If kid A gets to the sandbox first, he will play first (finders keepers) even if other kids arrive to the sandbox.  If there are two sets of the shovel and bucket and two kids,  each kid will build their own sandcastles (pullers keepers).  If there are two sets of shovels and buckets, with two interested kids who cooperate and build one huge sandcastle, there's a eureka moment where the result (final sandcastle) is greater than the sum of its parts, which promotes sharing.

Applied to a more grown-up world, the same concept holds.  This semester, one of my courses assigned a large group project over the semester with periodic deadlines for portions of the project.  There are 5 random people per group.  Having aced kindergarten, I'm happy to cooperate with group members since I know that the result should be better if all 5 members work together compared to only one or two.  The first group meeting is arranged where our group works together and share our results using Google Docs.  After this initial meeting, there was never another where all 5 people were present.  This wouldn't be a problem if there was progress on the project, but there was none.  To promote cooperation, I tried emailing group members and asked for phone numbers to schedule meetings and inquire about work being done.  When the group members gave reasons for their unavailability such as watching a play, going to play basketball, going to the bars, and not responding to calls or texts, I discarded hope for cooperation.  With deadlines looming and plenty of unanswered project questions, I took the responsibility of doing the project myself while giving email updates to the group.  Eventually, one group member contacted me and wanted to cooperate on the project.  The two of us made sure there were no questions or errors in our project before the submission date.  After the deadline, our professor informed us there would be confidential peer evaluations within groups.  Percentages could be subjectively assigned that were proportionate to the amount of work done by each group member.  Since I had worked with one other group member towards the deadline, I split the credit evenly between the both of us, leaving none for the other 3 members.  I found out later that my cooperative partner assigned his evaluation credit in the same manner.  Such an experience shows how a "share-the-spoils" button was pressed since the credit was evenly shared between myself and one helpful group member, even though I had done a majority of the work by the time they offered to help.  A pullers keepers concept was also demonstrated, because although there was inequality present amongst our group, there was no desire to give credit to those who did not do their fair share.

"Breakable Habits"
A personal example where my opportunism was a consequence of bad habits does not come to mind for me.  However, it does remind me of my close friend when he first entered the job force.  I had known my friend since high school, and he was always into computers.  He was also very perfectionist, and would constantly switch from joy to rage as he lauded his next grand website design before complaining how the implementation wasn't optimized to his liking.  He fittingly got a programming job at a tech company after college.  At the company, work hours were very flexible and a work from home option was available.  Being a night owl, he took the work from home option as an opportunity to continue his programming optimizations late into the night and work from home the following day.  However, consistently working from home was frowned upon and he realized a habit of he was taking advantage of the work from home system.  At the same time, he was making a habit of waking up late in the afternoon.
I don't know what my friend did to break his habit.  However, if I analyze from an outsider's point of view I'd say there is a definite chance the methods explained in the NY Times article could be effective.  I suppose the routine in this case is the act of programming throughout the night, and the reward would be obtaining a subjectively perfect result from the optimizations.  The cue could be work related, if there are intensive projects during busy seasons or when time til deadlines are shortened.  Another cue possibility could be during normal sleeping hours, where he will try to work through the sleepiness that occurs around 10-11 pm by programming.  Potential modifications to the cue could be making sleep preparations around normal sleeping hours through medication, remedies like warm milk, or hot showers.  That would cause a routine change from programming to sleeping.  The reward could be shifted from a satisfactory programming result to perhaps a tantalizing breakfast, preferably with bacon.