Generalizing Psych Activities

In my multi-cultural psychology class we did this activity: thumb-wrestle for 1 minute and each time a partner pins the other, they get .2 extra credit points. As soon as we were told this and paired up, I said to my partner, "this makes me feel awkward, let’s do whatever and say we each won twice.” She agreed.

Our thumb-wrestling was really more pleasant conversation than anything else—mostly about how my thumbs relative to hers were enormous and how the activity therefore wasn't fair. I did wind up winning both of the two wrestles we did. Time was up and the teacher started to say what I (and probably you) had expected all along.

This activity wasn’t about the winner or loser, it was about how we would engage in the activity, specifically whether we had more collectivistic (cooperative, group-oriented) or individualistic (competitive, individual-oriented) tendencies. It was meant to elicit behavior like me proposing we split the victories regardless of the outcome. As the teacher was explaining this, my partner said she’d write down that I’d won 3 wrestles and she’d won 1. 

This activity was...interesting. My teacher said it was to see whether we were more collectivistic or individualistic but I strongly contest the fact that an exercise like this provides much real insight into our generalized behavior. There are soooo many others factors coming into play. 

Yes, I said let’s split the points. No, that doesn’t necessarily make me a collectivistic person. I said what I did because I personally don’t value .6 points of extra credit so much that I’d be competitive to an off-putting extent. In my opinion the social perception of being a “tryhard” strongly trumps the insignificant amount of extra credit available. 

So whether I’m an individualistic person or not (I am), this activity doesn’t reflect my true beliefs because there are other social factors that act on the situation with greater strength than the extra credit incentive did. From a brief glance around the room, it seemed like most if not all students had made some sort of “collectivist compromise” like myself, though we have no way of really knowing whether or not this collectivism applies to any other aspects of our lives. 

So this collectivism activity, while it may shed light on some specific situational attitudes, cannot be generalized because there are too many other factors at play. I’m guessing my teacher knows this, but it still bothered me enough that I wanted to write about it, haha. 

A couple of other things I noticed:

• My partner wrote down 3-1 instead of the actual score, 2-0. She probably felt that even though I said I was totally fine splitting the total that she should be fair. 
• We could have kept the orginal score because I still had two more than her. But 2-0 is significantly different from 3-1 because with the latter she also earns points. 
• Lastly, while I did say we should make it even, I didn’t specifically lose intentionally to make our scores actually even. I was just going to do the thumb-wrestling, disregard the ultimate score, and say we were even. After I won two I could have (very obviously) let myself lose so we both actually won and lost twice. I wonder if other people did this. Does it say anything about me? Probably, but I don’t know exactly what. Let me know your thoughts below :)