by Alfie Kohn
This process is shameful for many reasons, but the one I want to stress here is the resultant decline in learning. Performance ultimately suffers from competition just as it suffers from the use of any extrinsic motivator.
One final observation: to the extent that an extrinsic motivator can have a positive effect, one of the most powerful motivators is not money or victory but a sense of accountability to other people. This is precisely what cooperation establishes: the knowledge that others are depending on you.67 The only stake others have in your performance under a competitive arrangement is a desire to see you fail.
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The distinction between trying to do well and trying to beat others is not the only explanation we can come up with for competition’s failure. Competition also precludes the more efficient use of resources that cooperation allows. One of the clear implications of the research conducted by David and Roger Johnson is that people working cooperatively succeed because a group is greater than the sum of its parts. This is not necessarily true for all activities, of course; sometimes independent work is the best approach. But very often—more often than many of us assume—cooperation takes advantage of the skills of each member as well as the mysterious but undeniable process by which interaction seems to enhance individuals’ abilities. Coordination of effort and division of labor are possible when people work with each other, as Deutsch saw.68 Noncooperative approaches, by contrast, almost always involve duplication of effort, since someone working independently must spend time and skills on problems that already have been encountered and overcome by someone else. A technical hitch, for example, is more likely to be solved quickly and imaginatively if scientists (including scientists from different countries) pool their talents rather than compete against one another.
Here it is not competition that is peculiarly unproductive; any kind of individual work suffers from this drawback. But structural competition has the practical effect of making people suspicious of and hostile toward one another and thus of actively discouraging cooperation. (The evidence on competition and affiliation will be reviewed in detail in chapter 6.) This occurred to both Peter Blau and Robert Helmreich as they tried to make sense of their respective findings. Blau’s competitive employment agency workers “in their eagerness to make many placements . . . often ignored their relationships with others”; their noncompetitive counterparts, meanwhile, enjoyed more “social cohesion [which] enhanced operating efficiency by facilitating co-operation.”69 Helmreich likewise proposed that “highly competitive individuals may alienate and threaten others who are in a position to assist and support them in their activities.”70
The dynamics of cooperative effort make this arrangement far more efficient, while competitors hardly are predisposed to like and trust each other enough to benefit from it. Moreover, as the Johnsons point out, people who feel accepted by others also feel safe enough to explore problems more freely, take risks, play with possibilities, and “benefit from mistakes rather than [endure] a climate in which mistakes must be hidden in order to avoid ridicule.”71 None of these is likely to occur when a potential partner has been transformed into an opponent—which is, of course, what competition entails.
Beyond the greater efficiency of cooperation, it is also true that competition’s unpleasantness diminishes performance. While many people apparently enjoy competitive games—a subject to which we will return in the next chapter—it would seem that most of us find competition distinctly unpleasant in most circumstances. Recall, for example, the data indicating a preference for cooperation in both recreation and learning on the part of preschoolers through undergraduates (see [>]). Largely because it is more fun, but also because it is more productive—thus setting an auspicious cycle in motion—cooperation induces people to perform better. In the classroom, it also “promote[s] more positive attitudes toward the subject area and the instruction experience,”72 thereby promising more intrinsic motivation and continued superior work in the future.
The pattern that keeps appearing, in which competition not only fails to contribute to success but positively inhibits it, turns up again here. Not only is competition not enjoyable enough to elicit high achievement—it is a distinct cause of anxiety. Even if the tangible stakes (money, job, trophy, grades) are not always high when people compete, the psychological stakes invariably are. In any given competition, most people will lose. Anticipation of failure combined with—and fueled by—memory of previous failure is a recipe for agitation, nervousness, and similar emotional states that interfere with performance when they occur to any significant degree. Ruth Benedict describes Japanese adults who.
began to make mistakes and were far slower when a competitor was introduced. They did best when they were measuring their improvement against their own record, not when they were measuring themselves against others. . . . They felt the competition so keenly as an aggression that they turned their attention to their relation to the aggressor instead of concentrating on the job in hand.73
Of course this effect is far from uniform across all cultures or all individuals. It does, however, appear to be a widespread phenomenon even in a highly competitive society like ours, where one might have expected people to have become inured to the effect. In his study, Blau pointed to the reduction of anxiety in the cooperative group as another explanation for its higher productivity.74 Other studies, too, have discovered higher levels of anxiety among subjects who compete, which is, in turn, correlated with inferior performance.75 One line of research within behavioral psychology, in fact, regards competition as an aversive stimulus, rather like electric shock. To the extent that some people complete a task more rapidly in a competitive condition, then, it may be because they are attempting to end the competition as quickly as possible so as to escape from its unpleasantness.76
Those who defend competition typically do not deny that it produces anxiety; instead, they insist that anxiety motivates us to perform better. It is true that slight anxiety can be productively arousing. The “Yerkes-Dodson law,” as it has come to be known, states that there is an optimum level of arousal for every task, and that this level is lower for tasks that are more complex and difficult. But it would seem that competition often produces inhibiting levels of anxiety. At best, the stressfulness of a competitive situation causes us to try to avoid failure. And trying to avoid failure is not at all the same thing as trying to succeed. On the contrary, as the well-known motivation theorist John Atkinson wrote, “The tendency to avoid failure . . . functions to oppose and dampen the tendency to undertake achievement-oriented activities.”77 The need to cut one’s losses often results in reluctance to enter the competitive arena in the first place: deciding not to apply for the job or promotion,78 staying away from competitive recreation, remaining silent in the classroom, and so on. The person trying to avoid failure who is forced to compete may, paradoxically, become so agitated as to bring on failure—and this can happen irrespective of the task’s nature or difficulty. In any case, he or she certainly will not be in an ideal state for creative problem solving.
While this effect is very widespread, it will naturally be most pronounced among those who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they stand little chance of winning. Competition will lower achievement markedly for such individuals—which seriously affects the performance of the whole group (class, corporation, society). One way a competitive culture deals with those who find competition unpleasant, of course, is to accuse them of being “afraid of losing.” This language typically is used for purposes of derogation rather than explanation. The people who use such language often imply that fear is the only reason competition is opposed. Michael Novak, for example, refers to “those who deplore (and secretly dread) the intense competitiveness of American life,”79 while Christopher Lasch transforms criticism of competition into “distrust” and then asserts that this distrust “seems to originate in a fear that unconscious impulses and fantasies will overwhelm us if we allow them expression.”80
&nb
sp; This is really a fancy version of taunting one’s playmates by calling them chicken. It impugns the courage of critics—and perhaps their manliness, too, if one reads between the lines. But it is also a clever rhetorical move: it counterposes those who can offer reasons for their advocacy of competition with those who oppose it sheerly because of their emotional state. Furthermore, those who refer to a “fear of losing” mean to imply that this is a shameful reason for avoiding competition or for allowing it to adversely affect one’s performance. Many support a system that elicits such fear, saying, in effect, “Let the losers drop out if they can’t take the pressure.” Here I will not belabor the cruelty of this position—which is considerable in light of the number of people to whom it applies—nor attempt a psychological analysis of those who offer it. Instead, let me merely observe that the state in which many people find themselves during competition—whatever we choose to call it—apparently reduces the quality of performance and goes a long way toward explaining the evidence offered in the last section that competition does not promote excellence.
PRODUCTIVITY: BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL’S PERSPECTIVE
The fact that we do not generally do our best in a competitive situation will strike some people as being beside the point. Here are two hungry individuals; there is one dinner. Here are ten unemployed laborers; there is one job. How can the individuals involved be expected to do anything but compete? Isn’t competition the most productive response—indeed, the only rational one?
The answer, I will argue, is that it depends on the perspective we take and even on our definition of rationality itself. Calling our basic assumptions into question tends to make habitual solutions seem much less obvious. Consider the question of whether a person being shot at is morally permitted to shoot back. We can offer a definite opinion—or any opinion, for that matter—only if we have accepted at face value a hypothetical situation (condensed into one sentence) that freezes the action. When we watch the whole film, so to speak, other questions present themselves: Is the first person a marauder invading the second person’s home? Are there less deadly means of self-protection? Will returning fire result in the deaths of many others?
The case of competition is analogous. Competing for a job or a plate of food is a reasonable choice only if we restrict our vision to the situation as it exists in a given instant—if we disregard causes, consequences, and context. Really, we should want to know why the desired object is in short supply, what might have prevented this situation from having developed in the first place, how a competitive response will affect the two individuals tomorrow (as well as what other consequences it will have), and so forth.
Let me propose two different shifts in perspective, one radical and the other moderate, both of which will have the effect of making competition seem far less necessary or productive. The first shift proceeds from a question that very few of us ever ask: Whose advantage is being considered? In the traditional Western picture—and specifically that of classical economic theory—the very idea of rational behavior pertains to the individual. Decisions are based on the costs and benefits to the single actor, and a society is construed as just a collection of such actors. An individual theoretically chooses to accept the burdens of belonging to a society if it is in his or her own personal interest to do so.
This point of view has become second nature to us in the Western world, but as with so many other values and behaviors, there is no evidence to show that it is an inevitable feature of human life. Even contemporary China and Japan—to say nothing of less industrialized societies—contain elements of a qualitatively different worldview in which the group’s well-being is the standard by which decisions are made. The singular self is thought to be an illusion in certain cosmologies; the costs and benefits to any particular individual are seen as irrelevant in certain social systems. “But what do I get out of it?”—a question posed continually and unashamedly in the West—seems appallingly selfish or even difficult to understand in other parts of the world.
This collectivist or holistic perspective, incidentally, has at least as much claim to the title of “natural” as the individualist perspective to which we are wedded. The biologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards has proposed that evolution can more usefully be understood at the level of the group instead of at the level of individual organisms. Much animal behavior—including sacrifices and other acts that have been likened to altruism—makes sense when interpreted in terms of benefits to the whole group.81
When we compete, we do so out of a primary concern for our own welfare. If the welfare in question is instead that of a group of people, then cooperation follows naturally. Working together as a group would not be a strategy for maximizing individual gain but a logical consequence of thinking in terms of what benefits all of us. Will I lose in order that the group will gain? Sometimes such a tradeoff will occur, but it will not be seen as catastrophic. More to the point, this question would not even occur to someone whose worldview is different from our own. It would seem as odd as your feet asking whether the body as a whole benefits from jogging at their expense.
Shifting to a concern for the group’s welfare, which constitutes a change of goals, involves a radically different way of looking at the world. But even if we keep our individualism intact, an inquiry into various strategies for satisfying ourselves suggests that competition still makes little sense. The practice of trying to beat others, which derives from the assumption that my success depends on your failure, is productive only in the short run. If we evaluate our success over the long haul—a relatively modest shift in perspective that continues to ignore the question of what is best for the group—working together often benefits us as individuals.
Consider Garrett Hardin’s notion of the “tragedy of the commons.” From the perspective of each cattle farmer with access to a public pasture, it is sensible to keep adding animals to his herd. But the same reasoning that makes this decision seem sensible to one individual will make it seem sensible to all individuals. Each will pursue his selfinterest, the grass will be depleted, and everyone will lose.82 (If the farmers competed to feed more of their own cattle, or to get there first, the process would simply be accelerated: the more competition, the faster everyone loses.) In order to see this, we must adopt the perspective of the group. But even if we adopt this perspective temporarily, with our ultimate purpose still being to benefit each individual, it becomes clear that cooperation is more productive.
There are countless other examples of how cooperation works better than the competitive or independent pursuit of private gain. To cite a few:
• The economist Fred Hirsch pointed out that each individual in a crowd is able to see better by standing on tiptoe, particularly when others are doing so. But everyone would do better if no one stood on tiptoe.83
• Each individual thinks it in her interest to rush for the exit when fire breaks out, but a cooperative escape protects everyone’s interests and saves lives.
• Each hockey player is reluctant to wear a helmet when others are not doing so, since it restricts his vision. But a group decision to wear them benefits everyone by reducing the risk of serious injury.84
• Social change that will benefit all workers can take place only if collective action supersedes the quest for individual rewards. “The achievement of short-run material satisfaction often makes it irrational [from an individual perspective] to engage in more radical struggle, since that struggle is by definition against those institutions which provide one’s current gain.”85 This is precisely why “divide and conquer,” along with the practice of co-opting activists, is such an effective strategy for maintaining the status quo—and why the individualist worldview is a profoundly conservative doctrine: it inherently stifles change.
The most thoroughly documented example of how cooperation is a more effective means to personal gain—and how working at crosspurposes has the paradoxical effect of hurting everyone—comes from the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game that is so popula
r among psychologists (see footnote on [>]). Each of two players—you and another—simultaneously chooses to “cooperate” or “defect,” and your decisions, taken together, determine the reward:
Both cooperate: You cooperate; the other defects:
You: 3 You: o
Other: 3 Other: 5
You defect; the other cooperates: Both defect:
You: 5 You: 1
Other: o Other: 1
Here is the intriguing part: If the other person has defected, your losses will be cut if you defect, too. On the other hand, if the other person has cooperated, you can maximize your gain by defecting. From a strictly individual perspective, then, it seems rational to defect in either case. But seen as a unit, the two players do best when both cooperate. In the long run, each player does best when both cooperate. The game is somewhat contrived, of course, but its point is readily applicable to real life. Many of us pursue strategies that appear to be productive just so long as our standard remains what is in our own immediate best interest. When our perspective is widened we can see how this strategy is self-defeating to the community and, ultimately, even to ourselves.
Political scientist Robert Axelrod used the PD game to help determine whether individual nations would do better by cooperating or competing—a question firmly rooted in conventional Western individualism. He invited game theorists to submit computer programs with PD strategies; each program was then matched against all the others. The most successful entry (TIT FOR TAT) was the one that began by cooperating and then simply reciprocated the opponent’s last move. A second tournament elicited more devious strategies, many of which included frequent defections, but TIT FOR TAT won again. Axelrod notes that this program “succeed[ed] by eliciting cooperation from others, not by defeating them,” and he concludes that “cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in a predominantly noncooperative world, can thrive in a variegated environment, and can defend itself once fully established.”86 He stresses that people (or nations) are most apt to cooperate when they are relatively likely to have to deal with each other again in the future. (Other research with PD demonstrates that players do better—that is, cooperate more consistently—when they are given the chance to talk with each other beforehand.)87
