Activity from a few weeks ago

Before we discussed the activity we did two weeks ago I was unsure of what the point of it was. I was somewhat confused due to the lack of instruction given by Dr. Goates. However after our discussion it became more apparent of what we were supposed to gain from doing this activity. One of the main points that we discussed about this activity was the degree to which people would take the initiative to deviate from the ambiguous rule sheet. I wanted to act in a way that wasn’t completely following the rules that were established, I did not do this though. This was not because of fear of having a negative consequences, which was the main reason we concluded was the reason people did not do this, but rather I did not want to take the risk of doing something that would make the activity not turn out the way it was supposed to. I thought that doing something that was not specified in the rules may lead to some sort of confusion or miscommunication. One interesting aspect of this activity I noticed was how everyone did make an attempt to follow the set of rules we were given for the most part. During most of the activity many people were trying to follow the directions as well as they could. This seemed to change abruptly though as we began to run out of time. As we got close to the end of class people seemed to be less concerned about following the rules and began to act as they felt necessary. I think the reasoning behind this is that since we were running out of time people realized a sense of urgency for wanting to earn extra credit. People knew that they needed to do something to gain control of the extra credit so they started caring less about what the rules were and started playing by their own rules so they had a better chance of getting extra credit. I thought it was interesting to see how people started to look out for their own interest rather than the interest of the group that they were in.