Results of the Experiment

Personally I thought what we accomplished as a class is quite rare. To get this many people working together is not an easy task. The only reason that I believe we were able to do this was because we all had one goal to reach. That goal was to get an A in this project and we all felt that would be easiest to accomplish by working together. Prof. Baldwin made this a competitive assignment. One person could have destroyed the whole plan and gotten the A themselves but I think everyone had a fear of failing this assignment. That fear outweighed the reward and everyone thought it would be best to share the load and accomplish the task as a group. Collaboration instead of competition In this case the zero sum case failed because no one gained anything on the behalf of someone else. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. I think our experiment really fit this description of game theory. Based on the choice of other students in the class, we all individually decided that the best choice would be to agree to the choice made. There were times when the group seemed like it was about to fall apart but everyone stuck together till the end and we got it done. For a social experiment we as a class showed that teamwork is a great solution to any task. Also this showed that no matter how competitive the world is these days with everyone trying to get on top of everyone else, people still prefer teamwork to accomplish their goals. I personally feel everything is a lot easier when you have people to share the burden. One can also say that people would pretty much do anything to get what they want. In our case, getting an A. So this just makes everyone seem a little selfish because if there wasn't a grade attached would their really be this much collaboration? I don't like to look at it that way. I think everyone made the rational and best decision. Everyone knew this assignment would easier working as a team.