by Alfie Kohn
Meanwhile, the management guru celebrated from Detroit to Tokyo, W. Edwards Deming, has declared that the practice of having employees compete against each other is
unfair [and] destructive. We cannot afford this nonsense any longer. . . . [We need to] work together on common problems [, but] annual rating of performance, incentive pay, [or] bonuses cannot live with teamwork. . . . What takes the joy out of learning . . . [or out of] anything? Trying to be number one.24
What does lead to excellence, then? This depends on what field and task we are talking about, but generally we find that people do terrific work when (1) they are inspired, challenged, and excited by what they are doing, and (2) they receive social support and are able to exchange ideas and collaborate effectively with others.* The data show that competition makes both less likely.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union has led a lot of Americans to construct the following syllogism: since (a) our economic system is based on competition, (b) their system collapsed, and (c) we were rivals, this must mean that (d) competition works. It would take considerably more space than I have been allotted here to offer a serious challenge to this rather dubious bit of deduction. Suffice it to say that the very adversarial nature of the relationship between the two countries—competition writ large, in other words—has had a great deal to do with trouble experienced on both sides of the old iron curtain. Of course, many factors played a part in sinking communism, but if we are looking for a simple explanation, we would do well to focus not on the absence of competition but on the absence of the Soviet citizen’s commitment to his or her work, chiefly due to the lack of personal autonomy and genuine democracy in that country. Then we might consider that the very same factors are present in this country.25†
Another unsettling event, although it is already fading from our memories, was the stock market crash of October 1987. Many analysts attributed that event to the “failure of international cooperation”—specifically, a struggle involving German interest rates and U.S. currency, and ultimately affecting the economic condition of many countries.26 The nations of the world seem to become more interdependent with each passing week; in the face of this fact, competition seems a mutually ruinous proposition. This is why it is dismaying that so few voices are raised against such competition,27 leaving U.S. politicians across the ideological spectrum to assume that the only question is how we can beat the Japanese (the enemy du jour), as opposed to whether triumph is preferable to cooperation—or even possible in any meaningful sense.
The lessons to be drawn from what happened to the USSR, why the market crashed, and how the United States should deal with other nations are, for the most part, matters for argument and speculation. But hard research continues to accumulate on specific questions related to the effects of small-scale competition.
I cited a 1982 study, for instance, in which children who were competing to make the best collage did less creative work than those who were not in a contest ([>]). Five years later, the same researcher described how she found the identical effect with adults, including corporate executives and managers, who were working on the kind of problems used to measure creativity: those who were competing to devise better solutions than anyone else were less likely to solve them correctly than were those who did not compete at all.28
I also described a 1981 study in which participating in a contest made adults less interested in the task on which they had been working (p. 60). Five years later, this finding was replicated with children: fifth- and sixth-graders were less likely to continue playing a balancing game if they had been competing earlier to keep themselves balanced longer than others.29 Moreover, a book from two of the country’s leading theorists of human motivation concluded that, compared to other ways of rewarding people, competition is the “most controlling (and thus most undermining of intrinsic motivation).”30
Speaking of balancing acts, I am reminded of the difficulty of persuading some people to question the value of competition once it dawns on them that the logical conclusion of this process may affect their tennis game. Since I am not on a nationwide crusade for the abolition of tennis—the race to win in the classroom, the workplace, and the home being far more destructive, as I see it—I have faced the very practical question of how to handle the inexplicably powerful attachment many Americans have formed to the idea that recreation must be structured so as to produce winners and losers. I have addressed groups of educators or managers who express a willingness to consider transforming what they do on the job every day but whose faces darken when I hint that competition does not suddenly become benign if it takes place on the weekend.
Some people respond by insisting that they play for fun and don’t really care who wins. I have not met many people for whom this is actually true—people who walk away from a victory and from a loss with exactly the same emotional state. But let us assume it happens. This delightful nonchalance about results offers an opportunity to take one small step away from the playing-field-as-battlefield model by resolving not to keep score. This suggestion, however, furrows brows. No score? The game will become boring! And so it may. But what have we here if not a powerful indictment of an activity so intrinsically tedious that we manage to stick with it only by relying on the artifice of quantifying our triumph over someone else?
If it is performance we seek—and I must confess to the heretical opinion that our lives would not be miserably impoverished in the absence of new records being set at the Olympics—then let us listen to what consulting sports psychologists tell their clients. Stop thinking about winning! these experts counsel: focus on the quality of your own performance.
At least one study has found that people are more likely to drop out of sports if they are motivated by victory rather than mastery.31 Moreover, a survey of more than 1,200 teenage athletes discovered that of all the factors thought to promote enjoyment of sports, winning “had the weakest relationship with Sport Enjoyment . . . and was not significantly predictive for the total sample, either gender, or any of the age groups.”32 And from yet another source we hear this: “When there is less focus on winning or losing and more focus on playing well in a competitive situation, there will be less detrimental effects of competition on intrinsic motivation.”33 This, however, is not just a sly tip to help athletes win. It is a fact that raises questions about the value of competing at all, in sports or anywhere else. It is further confirmation that doing well and beating others are, structurally as well as intentionally, altogether different enterprises.
An essay in Sports Illustrated tentatively questioned some of the common wisdom about competition a few years ago.34 An article in Psychology Today reviewed evidence that domestic violence increases whenever football games are televised.35 But the most satisfying news is not really new at all: cooperative games for children and adults are still available, offering fun without a struggle for triumph.*
I want to close by telling you about a few books and articles, most of them published since 1985, that I have found enormously useful. If you have read this far, you, too, may want to take a look at them. Bibliographic particulars can be found in the newly expanded reference section.
For parents who view sibling rivalry as something to be solved rather than accepted as a Fact of Life, I recommend Siblings Without Rivalry, an accessible and practical collection of advice by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
Readers who want further substantiation for the argument made in chapter 2 to the effect that competition is not really the dominant theme of the natural world might have a look at The New Biology by Robert Augros and George Stanciu.
For anyone interested in the problems inherent to an adversarial legal system, Partisan Justice by Marvin E. Frankel complements Anne Strick’s Injustice for All, which I have already mentioned, as does Thomas L. Shaffer’s article “The Unique, Novel, and Unsound Adversary Ethic.” For a fresh perspective on the corresponding view in philosophy (and other disciplines)—namely, that reason itself demands an adv
ersarial challenge to ideas—see Janice Moulton’s article “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method.”
Readers hungry for a thorough analysis of education in the United States, backed by solid research on children’s developing conceptions of ability and achievement, should not miss John Nicholls’s splendid book, The Competitive Ethos and Democratic Education. The emphasis we place on how well children are performing compared to their peers winds up undermining learning, Nicholls argues, and while fair competition may be better than unfair, “competition cannot be fair if competing with others itself produces inequalities in the motivation necessary to develop skills.”
To understand the problems with competition is, for many of us, to begin a search for concrete alternatives. I have already mentioned some resources for noncompetitive recreation and cooperative learning. But I should not overlook the large number of successful cooperative food stores, electric utilities, banks, insurance companies, and other businesses owned by consumers or workers. Co-op America (2100 M St. NW, Suite 403, Washington, DC 20037), which publishes a quarterly magazine, is one good place to look for more information about cooperatives; another is a book called the Cooperative/Credit Union Dictionary and Reference (available in paperback for $17 from the Cooperative Alumni Association, 250 Rainbow Lane, Richmond, Kentucky 40475).
Finally, for those interested in the possibility of not only working, learning, or playing together, but actually of living cooperatively, there are more than 300 “intentional communities” in North America composed of people who share any of a variety of interests. The Directory of Intentional Communities: A Guide to Cooperative Living offers a descriptive list of these communities as well as a collection of essays exploring what it means to be part of one. (It is available for $18 from Sandhill Farm, Route 1, Box 155, Rutledge, Missouri 63563.)
I hope that in another five or six years I have a great many more publications and programs to recommend to you, signifying that a critical view of competition is becoming less and less a fringe position. But let’s not wait for this to happen by itself. Let’s work together so our workplaces and classrooms, our playing fields and families, begin to provide opportunities for us to succeed together instead of at each other’s expense.
—A.K., 1992
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1. Walker Percy, “Questions They Never Asked Me,” p. 178. Percy used the analogy to elucidate the difficulty of thinking about the nature of language.
2. Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal, pp. 153–54.
3. Paul Wachtel, The Poverty of Affluence, p. 284. In fact, religion itself is a competitive enterprise in this country. “Denominations have traditionally vied with each other for numbers, wealth, power, and status; and they increasingly are in competition with secular interest groups,” writes William A. Sadler, Jr. (“Competition Out of Bounds,” p. 167). See also chapter 6 of Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy.
4. Anne Strick, Injustice for All, p. 114. Here is Strick’s historical analysis: “Losers, predominantly, settled our nation: younger sons with neither purse nor title; refugees from religious and political persecutions, from slums and ghettos, from hopelessness, from debtor’s prisons and famines. With each new wave of immigrants, new Losers came. But they were Losers come here to win. And win they did: not merely, for many, opportunity and wealth; but a continent from its rightful owners. Those who won, however, did so essentially in struggle against wilderness and fellow man. Winning was the American dream and ultimate blessedness; losing the nightmare and unforgivable sin” (p. 112).
5. Sadler, p. 168.
6. Bernard Holland, “The Well-Tempered Tenor,” p. 28.
7. Apparently Lombardi himself regretted the comment, which seemed to take on a life of its own. “I wish to hell I’d never said the damned thing,” he was said to have remarked shortly before his death. “I meant having a goal. . . . I sure as hell didn’t mean for people to crush human values and morality” (James A. Michener, Sports in America, p. 432).
8. The first figure is from U.S. Statistical Abstract for 1985. The second is from “Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983” in the September 1984 issue of Federal Reserve Bulletin.
9. Morton Deutsch, the social psychologist who pioneered research in this field, defined competition as a situation of “contrient interdependence,” which means that “participants are so linked together that there is a negative correlation between their goal attainments” (The Resolution of Conflict, p. 20). Back in 1937, Mark A. May and Leonard Doob defined it as a situation in which two or more individuals worked toward an end that could not be achieved by all of them (Cooperation and Competition, p. 6). Leonard Berkowitz’s definition was along the same lines: “Two or more units, either individuals or groups, engaged in pursuing the same rewards, with these rewards so defined that if they are attained by one unit, there are fewer rewards for the other units in the situation” (Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis, p. 178).
10. Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, p. 160.
11. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, p. 198.
12. Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 45.
CHAPTER 2
1. For a good discussion of the Burt phenomenon, including speculation as to why so many have been so eager to accept his conclusions, see R. C. Lewontin et al., Not in Our Genes, chapter 5.
2. An outstanding and wide-ranging critique of biological determinism is contained in Not in Our Genes, by R. C. Lewontin, a highly respected evolutionary geneticist; Steven Rose, a neurobiologist; and Leon J. Kamin, a psychologist. They explore such issues as schizophrenia, gender-based differences, and intelligence, concluding, “The only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is ‘in’ that nature to construct its own history” (p. 14). Stephen Jay Gould also put it well: “Why imagine that specific genes for aggression, dominance, or spite have any importance when we know that the brain’s enormous flexibility permits us to be aggressive or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous? Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness áre just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish” (“Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” p. 349). Also see Gould’s essay, “The Nonscience of Human Nature.”
3. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. ix.
4. Konrad Lorenz, of course, attempted to do just this. Some of the best critical essays on his work and that of such other naturalists as Robert Ardrey are contained in Man and Aggression, edited by Ashley Montagu. Aggression, naturally, is of special interest to us here because of its relationship to competition (see chapter 6).
5. This is usually formulated by ethical theorists as “ought implies can,” and was articulated by Immanuel Kant: “Duty demands nothing of us which we cannot do. . . . When the moral law commands that we ought to be better men, it follows inevitably that we must be able to be better men” (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 43, 46).
6. Leslie H. Farber, “Merchandising Depression,” p. 64.
7. See, for example, “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, and almost anything by Sören Kierkegaard or Jean-Paul Sartre.
8. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, p. 55.
9. John Harvey et al., Competition: A Study in Human Motive, p. 12.
10. James S. Coleman, The Adolescent Society, p. 318; his emphasis.
11. Harvey Ruben, Competing, p. ix.
12. Ibid., p. 22.
13. Ibid., p. 20.
14. Ibid., p. 39; his emphasis.
15. The tendency to construe apparently friendly acts as hostile has been found to be one of the signal differences between normal and disturbed populations (Harold L. Raush, “Interaction Sequences,” p. 498).
16. Harold J
. Vanderzwaag, Toward a Philosophy of Sport, p. 127.
17. Mary Ann O’Roark, “‘Competition’ Isn’t a Dirty Word,” p. 66.
18. Garrett Hardin, Promethean Ethics: Living with Death, Competition, and Triage, p. 36.
19. There are certain areas of thought from whose contributions we are sometimes asked to infer the conclusion that competition is inevitable. These include the study of other species, which is the subject of the next section; and two currents within psychology—psychoanalysis and social comparison theory—which are addressed in the last section of this chapter. I am not aware of any serious arguments for competition’s inevitability explicitly offered from within these fields, however.
20. David W. and Roger T. Johnson, “Instructional Goal Structure: Cooperative, Competitive, or Individualistic” (hereafter “Structure”), p. 218.
21. Ashley Montagu cited in Johnson and Johnson, “Cooperation in Learning: Ignored But Powerful,” p. 1. Psychiatrist Roderic Gorney agrees: “Any objective appraisal of modern man will disclose that in the overwhelming preponderance of human interactions cooperation completely overshadows competition” (Human Agenda, pp. 101–2; his emphasis). See also Arthur W. Combs, Myths in Education, pp. 15–17.
22. “Aggression, anxiety, guilt, and self-centered motives and behavior have been so much the cloth of theory and research that questions of a ‘softer’ side of young human beings seem almost unscientific” (Marian Radke Yarrow et al., “Learning Concern for Others,” p. 240).
23. For example, see H. L. Rheingold and D. F. Hay, “Prosocial Behavior of the Very Young”; Marian Radke Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn Waxier, “The Emergence and Functions of Prosocial Behaviors in Young Children”; Yarrow et al., “Learning Concern”; James H. Bryan, “Prosocial Behavior”; Maya Pines, “Good Samaritans at Age Two?”; and my own “That Loving Feeling—When Does It Begin?” Yarrow and Waxier write as follows: “The capabilities for compassion, for various kinds of reaching out to others in a giving sense are viable and effective responses early in life. . . . Very young children were often finely discriminative and responsive to others’ need states” (pp. 78–79).
