No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  CHINESE people, despite becoming more serious about sports107 and despite the recent introduction of a system encouraging academic competition, remain far more cooperative than Americans. Students say they prefer cooperative activities to competitive ones, and “peer group norms approving helpfulness and the simple enjoyment of social rather than isolated studying often led students to cooperate even if they had to give more help than they received.”108

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  These research summaries do not by any means constitute an exhaustive account of noncompetitive societies or of the discrepant levels of competitiveness across different cultures. But even this brief survey should suggest that competition is a matter of social structure rather than human nature. Competition may be an integral part of certain institutions in contemporary Western society, such as capitalism, but it is clearly not an unavoidable consequence of life itself.

  The cross-cultural data allow for several generalizations. First, as must be obvious, “rural children in all cultures studied are more cooperative in conflict-of-interest situations that require mutual assistance,”109 and we may tentatively propose that urban living is generally associated with—if not causally related to—structural as well as intentional competition. This, of course, does not mean that all rural societies will be noncompetitive or that all urban areas will be equally competitive.

  Second, competitive societies tend also to hurry their children toward adulthood,110 a feature of American society described and decried recently by several critics. Third, there is a remarkable correspondence between competitiveness in a society and the presence of clearly defined “have” and “have-not” groups.111 This correlation between economic maldistribution and competition seems to fit with the findings of Mead et al. concerning the absence of possessiveness and hoarding behavior in cooperative cultures.

  These studies also allow us to debunk several widely held assumptions about competition. First, there is no necessary relationship between competitiveness and achievement. That this is true on the individual level will be explored in detail in the next chapter. On the societal level, Roderic Gorney conducted a careful study of the research available on 58 cultures. He defined achievement as complex accomplishments in the arts, sciences, the law, and other fields, and found, to his surprise, that there was no significant relationship between achievement and competition.112

  Second, competition is not a prerequisite for strong ego development, which is used by some psychologists as a shorthand expression for psychological health. “Strong ego development can occur in individualistic, competitive, or cooperative societies,” according to Mead’s findings.113 In fact, competition’s deleterious effect on self-esteem and health will be explored in chapter 5.

  Finally, it is sometimes argued that cooperation is a luxury permitted in places or times of plenty; when resources are scarce, people are said to resort to competitive behavior. This is simply false. Mead and her colleagues found counterexamples of both types: competitive societies where there was an economy of abundance (e.g., the Kwakiutl Indians) and cooperative societies where there was an economy of scarcity (e.g., the Bateiga of East Africa). It is the norms of the culture that determine its competitiveness, not the presence or absence of resources. As Mead put it, “It is not the actual supply of a desired good which decrees whether or not the members of a society will compete for it or cooperate and share it, but it is the way the structure of the society is built up that determines whether individual members shall cooperate or shall compete with one another.”114 In fact, Mead went further than this, suggesting at one point that the relative plenty in several societies was the result of their cooperative arrangements, not the cause.115 Put differently, cooperation can be seen as an appropriate, rational response to scarcity since it is probably more effective at maximizing what one has. This is what Marshall Sahlins was getting at on [>], and William O. Johnson put it even more bluntly: “Pioneers were not competitive people, they were a cooperative people. They wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”116 To say that people naturally become competitive when there isn’t enough to go around is not merely inaccurate, but a reflection of how easily we universalize our own cultural norms.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS FOR INEVITABILITY

  Anyone who accepts Freud’s model of the personality and human development is likely to assume that competition is unavoidable. Even if Freud does not come out and say this explicitly, the implications of his thought are clear, so a few words about psychoanalytic theory are in order.117

  In Freud’s view, we begin life screaming for gratification, little more than a bundle of needs. This is how we leave life, too; maturity consists only in learning to put off that gratification and reconfigure some of the needs. We remain self-centered creatures in search of pleasure; the ego always is in the service of the id. Moreover, “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved . . . they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”118 According to this view, if I appear to be concerned about cooperating with others, you may safely assume that I have either (1) cleverly figured out some way to use other people to my own ends and to make it look like cooperation, or (2) unconsciously transformed my feelings of hostility into their opposite so as to keep these feelings out of my awareness. Other people are means to my own (primarily sexual) satisfaction or else rivals to be bested. Any appearances to the contrary represent the desperate attempt of culture to tame our base instincts. But this attempt is finally futile because “instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests.”119 Life, as Hobbes had written three centuries before, is nasty, brutish, and short—but for Freud there is no Hobbesian body politic to rescue us from this condition.

  Competition, in this view, is inevitable, of course. Its development is elaborated in the early parent-child relationship. A desire to win the parent’s love can fuel endless competitive struggle; an internalization of the parent means that adults, with parents long dead, can still be driven to win for the same reason. Psychoanalysts also explicate competition (particularly among men) according to the Oedipal conflict: the opponent is always Daddy; the prize, Mommy. To evince some reluctance to compete cannot be based on a rational decision (ultimately, for the classical psychoanalyst, virtually nothing is). Rather, one is unconsciously anxious about the symbolic consequences of beating the father. In all, competition is natural and, like other drives, can be hidden or sublimated but never escaped. To attempt the latter is inadvisable, according to Anna Freud: “Inhibition of exhibitionism, of curiosity, of aggression, of competition, etc., produces the same crippling effect on the individual’s personality whether they occur early or late in life.”120

  To attempt a refutation of this position is to take on the very heart of Freudian thought, which is well beyond the scope of this book. Much of this chapter, however, is responsive to these assumptions, and the interested reader is referred to the writings of the ego psychologists, the neo-Freudians (particularly Karen Horney), and the humanistic psychologists. Even among psychoanalytically inclined psychiatrists, in fact, one can find chinks in the armor of inevitability. One rather obscure British psychoanalyst, lan Suttie, sees competition as a manifestation of the “search for the security and satisfaction of social integration (fellowship)” rather than as an autonomous instinct.121 Following him, Roderic Gorney describes human development as a progression from “being preponderantly dependent on others for survival” to having “others predominantly depend on us.” Throughout our lives, he argues, we are involved in cooperation.122 To take another example, the psychiatrist Herbert Hendin talks about fathers who become involved with their sons “in a way that cement[s] them in competitive, anxiety-ridden situations, or undermine[s] their ability to become independent. The competitive work situations that constitute the major bond between such fathers and sons serve to create models for the sons’ future relations with men.”123 The clear implication here is that the Oedipal
prototype for competitive interaction can be traced to particular styles of child-rearing that are avoidable. These, of course, are minority reports, but however unfortunate the implications of psychoanalysis may be regarding the question of inevitability, its framework can be useful in exploring the relationship between competition and psychological health (see chapter 5).

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  Another argument for inevitability, drawn from social psychology, concerns the phenomenon of social comparison. Our identities are a function of our social world; others define who we are. Therefore, it is proposed, we are always in the process of comparing ourselves with others—and our behaviors and products with those of the people around us. This process is said to be particularly critical during childhood when our identities are quite literally being formed. It continues because social comparison tells us whether what we do is any good. The second step in this argument is that comparison implies competition: if I am looking over at you, I naturally will want to be better than you.124

  Because of its familiarity and apparent plausibility, this argument demands a response. In fact, the very simplicity that makes it appealing also undermines its explanatory power. It is true that comparing what we do to what someone else does goes on all the time, but let us not assume that this is the only way to check how we are doing. As Rainer Martens wrote, “To evaluate one’s abilities, it is necessary to make a comparison between at least two elements: your own performance and some other standard . . . [that] can include another individual, a group, one’s own past performance, or some idealized performance level.”125 Notice how the second element does not have to be another person. It is true that an “idealized performance level” originally may have been derived from others’ performances, but in practice neither of Martens’s last two standards is experienced as competition.

  It is not a fact of human nature that a person’s sense of competence or identity has to be derived from social comparison. It is instead a matter of what kind of task is being performed at the moment and what kind of culture one lives in. The latter is especially important. Psychologist Albert Bandura observed that “in competitive, individualistic societies . . . where one person’s success represents another person’s failure, social comparison figures prominently in selfappraisal.” In other societies, this is not necessarily the case.126 Consider Jerome Kagan’s illustrations:

  The seminal experiences of this era [the years just prior to puberty] are those that persuade youth that they can successfully gain the prizes they want. A father in a cornfield teaching his eight-year-old son how to plant maize finds it easy to create a situation that will accomplish this goal. It is more difficult when the child is with one teacher in a class of thirty children. From the child’s perspective, the private evaluation of progress is based primarily on a comparison of one’s performance with that of one’s peers.127

  Most of us have spent more time in a crowded classroom than in a quiet cornfield, so we assume that our own situation is an unavoidable part of growing up.

  Even to the extent that one’s esteem or sense of mastery initially is the result of comparing oneself with others, this may well be temporary—a developmental stage. While acknowledging that competition may well become the dominant basis of self-definition “in a highly competitive school system or neighborhood,” Joseph Veroff adds: “with adequate social comparison about valued characteristics a person can relax about social comparison [and] . . . move back into considering his own autonomous capacities for mastery.”128 An adult with a reasonably healthy self-concept, in other words, does not need to continue asking ritualistically, “How’m I doin’?” or even to compare herself or himself with others. Interestingly, a number of psychologists have included autonomous self-evaluation in their definitions of psychological health.129

  My intent up to this point has been to qualify the assumption that we all have to compare ourselves with others. The next step, then, will be to ask whether this comparison, when it does occur, necessitates competition. We can immediately see that the answer is no: I can compare my hobbies (or shoes or kitchen) with yours without feeling in the least that one is better than another. I may make the comparison with the intention of making sure I am not appreciably different from you; social comparison may be geared toward conformity. But even when this is not the case—and even when the comparison is suffused with judgment—it does not follow that I must feel competitive with you. The Bathonga of South Africa, we are told, compare their fishing catches, but “there is no indication that individuals strive to outdo one another.”130 Closer to home, I may compare my own writing with Shakespeare’s (or, for that matter, with that of a contemporary) and sense my own relative inferiority. This could motivate me to improve or, specifically, to emulate features of his writing that I admire. Neither of these means that I feel the need to become better than he. If you and I run together for recreation, your greater speed or endurance may help to improve my own without my ever trying to beat you. As John Harvey puts it, “It is one thing to act from a desire to excel somebody else at something. It is quite another to act with a view to getting something done . . . and yet to be stimulated in the activity by the parallel or contrasted activity of others.”131 To the proponent of competition who insists that differences in ability will always exist, then, we may reply that it is the significance invested in these differences and not the differences themselves that constitutes competition. The inability to observe discrepant abilities without turning the situation into a contest is a learned disposition. The degree of an individual’s competitiveness can be expressed as a function of how frequently this happens and how strongly one feels the need to be better. But there is not a shred of evidence that this inclination is an unavoidable feature of human life.

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  Even if it is true that both structural and intentional competition are far from inevitable, their pervasiveness in our society is a concrete and formidable barrier to change. We cannot make this society noncompetitive by the end of the week, and this chapter should not be read as claiming such. At the same time, we should be on guard against the claim that competition is inherent in our culture. When it is contended that competition is destructive, some people will reply that there is nothing we can do about it, regardless of the existence of other noncompetitive cultures. This tack has been used to argue against the possibility of changing any number of objectionable features in a society. It is another version of the self-fulfilling prophecy we encountered, and—to return to the subject of this chapter’s opening—it is a profoundly conservative posture in its consequences, if not in its intention.

  Any example of people behaving noncompetitively should, strictly speaking, have been enough to refute the human nature argument. But we are dealing with people here rather than with mathematical proofs, so it has been necessary to show that a noncompetitive orientation—if not the deliberate practice of cooperation—is a serious possibility, a realistic alternative for our lives. That has been the point of this chapter. Now it is time to move from can to should: since competition is not necessary, we are free to consider whether it is desirable.

  3

  Is Competition More Productive?

  THE REWARDS OF WORKING TOGETHER

  Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production.

  —Edward Bellamy,

  Looking Backward (1888)

  Leaf through a few popular articles about competition, engage a few people in conversation on the subject, and you will find a single conviction that appears as a refrain: Even minimal productivity, to say nothing of excellence, would disappear if we ceased competing. Competition brings out the best in us. To compete is to strive for goals, to learn competence, to reach for success. A noncompetitive society would represent, in Spiro Agnew’s assorted metaphors, “a bland experience . . . a waveless sea of nonachievers . . . the psychological retreat of a person . . . into a cocoon of f
alse security and self-satisfied mediocrity.”1

  Whether competition promotes “success” (however we choose to define that word) seems a rather straightforward question—one that could be resolved by the available evidence. Many people, however, do not look at this evidence because they do not see the question as an empirical one. The most common defense of competition turns out to rest on the assumption that success (or productiveness or goal attainment) means competition. Given this assumption, the assertion that no one would get anything done without competition doesn’t require proof; it is self-evident. “The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone,” wrote Elliot Aronson.2

  But success and competition are not at all the same thing. Put plainly, one can set and reach goals—or prove to one’s own and others’ satisfaction that one is competent—without ever competing. “Success in achieving a goal does not depend upon winning over others just as failing to achieve a goal does not mean losing to others.”3 A moment’s reflection reveals this as an undeniable truth. I can succeed in knitting a scarf or writing a book without ever trying to make it better than yours. Better yet, I can work with you—say, to prepare a dinner or build a house. Many people take the absence of competition to mean that one must be wandering aimlessly, without any goals. But competing simply means that one is working toward a goal in such a way as to prevent others from reaching their goals. This is one approach to getting something done, but (happily) not the only one. Competition need never enter the picture in order for skills to be mastered and displayed, goals set and met.