Friday evening preprint drop: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qx7ku/ It is a paper that 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/ - ThreadSky

akcay.theoretical.bio • 611 days ago

Friday evening preprint drop:

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

It is a paper that 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/

Comments

physgal.bsky.social•610 days ago

#AcademicSky

akcay.theoretical.bio•611 days ago

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 or "Penn Face" here at Penn. 2/

jonathanputhoff.bsky.social•608 days ago

I have noticed that the effect is strongly gendered in engineering, with males more likely to perform "casual competence" while females are more forthright about their time investment and difficulties.

akcay.theoretical.bio•607 days ago

That’s a very interesting observation! I looked for systematic data on this phenomenon but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot.

jonathanputhoff.bsky.social•607 days ago

Someone who does soc of gender reassured me that this was the case. If they have a different name for the phenomenon than "duck syndrome" I do not know what it is.

akcay.theoretical.bio•607 days ago

Oh I believe it fully, probably goes back all the way to math classes pre college! Finding citable data directly on the duck phenomenon was a challenge though, so if your contact has some refs, I’d very much love to see them.

jonathanputhoff.bsky.social•607 days ago

Unfortunately, this was a conversation that occurred many years ago. The subject only remains fresh in my mind since I keep encountering instances in the wild.

akcay.theoretical.bio•611 days ago

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/

akcay.theoretical.bio•611 days ago

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/

akcay.theoretical.bio•611 days ago

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/

akcay.theoretical.bio•611 days ago

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/

akcay.theoretical.bio•611 days ago

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.

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