A community that I am a part of is my group of three apartment-mates. Trust is very important to this community because we share living spaces that we trust each other to take care of. In the article by Bos, et. all, "Trust is best defined as a 'willingness to be vulnerable, based on positive expectations about the actions of others'". As stated in the Resnick article, trust is built up over time, based on experiences you have had with an individual. It is this information about the past that enables one to (or deters one from) trusting another. It is also the awareness that your actions now will affect how someone interacts (or doesn't) with you in the future that makes you do trustworthy things. Thus, in a shared living situation, we build trust in one another by being responsible about shared resources: keep kitchen clean, don't hog the bathroom, take out the trash and respecting personal spaces: turn the TV down, don't eat someone else's food, pay people back. Without this trust, we may "avoid collaborating with others altogether" (Bos, 135), providing for a tense and unenjoyable living situation.
Because we can't be constantly watching over each other, we need a way to make our merits/non-merits visible to allow for the trust-building process. This is where a reputation system would come in handy. One possible accountability system could be based on reports posted on the fridge. Every time a roomie did something for the group (take out trash, scoop cat's litter, buy more milk), they could write it on the fridge, under their name. Every time someone had a problem with another roomie's behavior, they could write this under the offending roomie's name. The incentive for good behavior is reputation, as you'd want to avoid having an empty "good" list and you'd want recognition for the contributions you've made. The "grievances" lists are needed because someone may still have a complaint about your performance that you weren't even aware of.
Possibly, one could manipulate the system by taking credit for something they didn't do, though this would probably be obvious. Others may post unfair or uncalled for complaints on your sheet, marring your reputation. One could also hurt themselves by not posting about their good deeds.
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I think for many situations like this some sort of positive feedback and recognition would help people continue their good behaviors. That may people know that other do care and appreciate what they have done. ie. if one of the roommates decides to clean up the common area, the other roommates could put a star or something next to that persons name in recognition. Maybe some "reward" could be useful as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen you're living with people you're very close with this shouldn't be necessary, but that isn't always the case.
The only reputation system my roommates and I have is that we have magnets on the fridge representing whose turn it is to take out the trash. If the trash is overflowing, we can look and see who is responsible for taking it out. However, we trust each other enough to know that there is probably a good reason the trash hasn't been taken out by that person yet.
In this reputation system, certain desired behaviors are rewarded by receiving positive acknowledgement from roommates. Although I agree that a reputation system may be unnecessary if you are living with people you are close with, it would be interesting to see if such a system could motivate roommates to complete shared tasks in a more timely manner since they would get negative feedback otherwise. By having such a system, trust could be built and overtime the feedback may not even be necessary for roommates to complete designated tasks. Overall, nice post!
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