Group projects can be a minefield of shared responsibilities and potential blame. When things go awry, pinpointing the culprit isn't always straightforward. Let's delve into the dynamics of group work and the factors that determine who gets the blame when things go wrong.
Consequences stick to some team members more than others
Do the junior and eminent person on a team receive equal blame for a retraction?
- Kellogg’s Benjamin Jones and Brian Uzzi looked at retracted academic articles with multiple authors and compared how frequently each author continued to be cited by fellow scholars following the retraction.
- They found that the more junior members of the team saw a substantial decline in citations of their work while the more eminent members experienced little or no change.
Are Power Dynamics in Academia to Blame?
More eminent authors have typically published a larger body of work than their greener coauthors
- Perhaps the better-known member of the team uses his or her social and institutional power to deflect the blame from him- or herself and to scapegoat less prominent collaborators
- Regardless, unequal assignment of blame could actually encourage irresponsible behavior
- If an eminent author knows that they are buffered from blame, it may make them less likely to be careful in their research, knowing that if anything does happen, the blame will fall on somebody else
The Matthew Effect
When multiple scientists collaborate and a paper is well-received, it is automatically assumed this success is disproportionately due to the brilliance of the team’s most eminent author
- In other words, those who are “rich” in reputation get richer with every success
- The reverse side of the Matthew Effect occurs when the more established author receives the lion’s share of credit for a success, perhaps that author will also receive the bulk of the blame for a mistake
Retractions Don’t Affect Everyone Equally
Jones, Uzzi, and their colleagues decided to focus on scientific research, where they felt the blame for a discredited project would be more easily quantifiable
- Using the Web of Science research database, they found nearly 500 papers published between 1993 and 2009 that had had multiple authors and that had been retracted
- The researchers determined a retracted author’s degree of eminence based on the number of papers they had previously published
- Calculated how many times each author’s earlier, pre-retraction work was cited by other researchers
