There’s always that one person in a group project who doesn’t want to pull their own weight. Even though everyone’s grade—including their own—hinges on cooperation, they’re content to freeload off the efforts of the rest of the group. This kind of dysfunctional dynamic is frustrating enough for short-term assignments, but it’s omnipresent in all other cooperative endeavors as well and can devastate them over the long term. Now, new research published in Nature is shedding light on why some people refuse to carry the load for others.
Over a five-year period, researchers monitored payments to a microfinance institution in Sierra Leone, tracking more than 47,000 transactions made by 7,108 borrowers. Under the joint liability lending system, individual debtors must contribute each month to ensure the group’s loan is fully repaid, otherwise all members lose access to credit.
“Group lending offers an ideal, real-work test of how cooperation evolves in groups,” study co-author David Klinowski of the College of William & Mary said in a statement. “Unlike research in the artificial context of a lab experiment, the stakes are high. Failing to contribute can have significant economic and social consequences.”
Read more: “Cooperation Is What Makes Us Human”
The researchers found that while cooperation started high, it gradually petered out as the debtors became more lax with their contributions. “They begin to drag their feet,” one staff member at the lending institution told the authors. Things only changed when a new loan cycle began. After debtors were formally reminded of their obligations, cooperation spiked again. Importantly, however, these surges of cooperative behavior faded more quickly with every cycle as members became desensitized to reminders.
This boom-bust-fading-boom cycle, which the researchers call “punctuated decline,” suggests that flagging cooperation reflects behavioral decay, rather than any rational planning. According to the researchers, institutions can anticipate cooperational slumps and take steps to counter them with strategic “resets”—or simply by automating payments.
Additionally, while this study focused on loan repayments, the authors say it describes a dynamic present in public welfare systems that extend beyond finance. “Although our research was conducted in a very specific setting, we believe that it captures fundamental aspects of human behavior and may be relevant to many forms of everyday cooperation,” study co-author Felix Reed-Tsochas of Oxford University said.
For example, the decision to get vaccinated, choosing to vote, and opting to donate to public projects all involve similar dynamics where the individual choice to pull your own weight is key to an optimum outcome.
Human beings can accomplish extraordinary things when we work together, so it’s worth figuring out why that can be so hard for us. 
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Lead image: deagreez / Adobe Stock
