Gavin M. LeightonAug 5, 2023
Erol Akcay

Friday evening preprint drop:

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qx7ku/

It is a paper slightly different from our usual fare, but deals with a topic close to home: why our students appear to be more and more overcommitted. This is something that I suspect many faculty (at least in US campuses) have observed. 1/

Aug 5, 2023 at 12:35amWeb
Show threadErol AkcayAug 5, 2023
The paper deals with one potential cause of it: social learning from peers and the pressure to appear successful without (too much) apparent effort. This is called the "floating duck syndrome" at Stanford (https://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/the-flourish/flourish-october-2022/focus-dont-be-duck-how-resist-stanford-duck-syndrome) or "Penn Face" here at Penn. 2/
In Focus: Don’t Be a Duck! How to Resist the Stanford Duck Syndrome.  

Student Affairs
Show threadErol AkcayAug 5, 2023
We model a social learning dynamic where agents try to make optimal choices for how much effort to spend and how many things to spend it on, but they don't know how "difficult" the world is. So they observe their peers and their successes to figure that out. 3/
Show threadErol AkcayAug 5, 2023
But if their peers hide their true effort (keep the furious paddling underwater, like the duck), we show that social learners will underestimate how difficult the world is. That has two consequences: ppl both spend too much effort, but also spread it too thin. 4/
Show threadErol AkcayAug 5, 2023
So, while the achieve more success, they also fail a lot more, causing an imbalance between rewards and their expectations based on their effort, a major determinant of many psychological problems. 5/
Show threadErol AkcayAug 5, 2023

We also consider potential solutions, and show that the most obvious solutions don't really solve the problem.

The upshot is that we think that colleges (and work places) need to pay more attention to social learning from peers and counter the biases to promote student (and worker) well-being. 6/

Show threadErol AkcayAug 5, 2023

We hope this paper will stimulate some conversations around this topic, and welcome any feedback!

Here again is the link:

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qx7ku/

7/fin.