No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  Sometimes, though, there are no such placeholders—no mediating qualities or skills. Some competitive desires (to earn more money, for instance, or be judged more attractive) can be understood immediately in terms of low self-esteem. This is even more evident with people whose competitiveness is not restricted to a particular activity—those who turn almost every interaction into a contest. Here we see most sharply how the need to be best at anything at all, which is to say at everything, actually represents an attempt to stave off a persistent and pronounced sense that one is fundamentally no good. The important point, though, whether or not there is some mediating quality involved, is that competitiveness eventually comes down to selfesteem.

  Doing well, as we saw earlier, is different from doing better than others. This is nowhere clearer than in the case of their respective motivations. All of us enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from being particularly good at something. Sometimes it is convenient to assess that performance by comparing it to those of other people. But the individual who feels good about herself and is simply interested in doing well does not go out of her way to outperform others. She does not seek out relative judgments. She is content with a sense of personal satisfaction, sometimes buttressed, depending on the activity, by a consideration of absolute standards. (She can check out the number of questions she answered correctly or see how long it took her to run the mile.) The desire to be better than others feels quite different from this desire to do well. There is something inherently compensatory about it. One wants to outdo in order to make up for an impression, often dimly sensed, of personal inadequacy. Unlike the joy of flexing one’s muscles or intelligence, which is sufficient unto itself, one wants to be stronger or smarter than others in order to convince oneself at some level that one is a good person. If competition has a voice, it is the defiant whine of the child: “Anything you can do, I can do better.” A competitive society is a chorus of such voices. And the energy of such a society (to switch metaphors) is provided by a combination of “obsessional thinking, anxiety over personal inadequacy, and hostility requiring an outlet,”5 according to Lawrence Frank.

  It is not quite accurate to talk about “wanting” to beat others, however. Because one is responding to the push of self-doubt rather than the pull of accomplishment, competition is more a need than a desire. Maslow has distinguished between “B” (for Being) and “D” (for Deficit) motivations with respect to love and cognition. B-love, he said, is characterized by an almost aesthetic pleasure, an admiration for a specific person. D-love is experienced as an urgent need, a drive whose object is generic. We can think of psychological growth as the process of moving from D to B: only after our basic needs are met can we proceed to a higher level of loving and thinking and living.6 Notwithstanding the finery in which it comes dressed, competitiveness is in reality a deficit-motivated trait. Being good at an activity is something we choose to do; outperforming others is experienced as something that we have to do. Our self-esteem is at stake.

  The obvious way to verify that competition is more a need than a desire is to see what happens when a competitive person is deprived of a chance to compete. Or, since the need to compete is really the need to win, we can watch what happens when such an individual loses. The result is more reminiscent of depriving a hungry person of supper than of removing a choice dish from the gourmet. One extraordinarily competitive businesswoman, who was transferred to a noncompetitive work environment, described her situation to me recently as being like “suffering a slow death.” This sort of reaction suggests that one’s very self is on the line. Lending further credence to this is the fact that the original urge to compete may be experienced as a fear of not competing. “Whenever I enter a competition,” said one marathon runner, “I’m fearful and apprehensive to try it. It’s hard to go to the line. But I’m fearful and apprehensive not to try it.”7 To do something because the psychological consequences of not doing it are too painful is quite different from doing something because of the gratification it provides. When the opportunity to alleviate that pain is removed, we would expect a reaction of anxiety or panic or rage. Thus, the actual reactions of competitive people support the proposition that it is low self-esteem that motivates them. For many, competition feels like damage control. The point is not so much triumph as vindication, not so much winning as not losing. To lose is to have one’s inadequacy exposed. It is dreadful confirmation of precisely what was feared in the first place. One struggles to win, to be better than everybody else, in a desperate, vain effort to convince oneself of one’s value.

  But how can competition be deficit-motivated if so many very competitive people are excellent at what they do? We sometimes need to be reminded that actual competence has little to do with self-esteem. No matter how many times they hear it, many talented or attractive people do not truly believe in their talent or attractiveness. Their quest to be noticed, rewarded, acknowledged is endless; it is like pouring liquid into a container with a hole in the bottom. This is because the source of the need lies not in the specific characteristic but in the underlying matter of low self-esteem. Recognition for some particular ability doesn’t address the matter of overall worth. There is nothing surprising, therefore, about the fact that even some very capable individuals need to prove how much better they are than others.

  If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete.* The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with “immense character strengths who don’t make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport.”8 Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down these activities.

  To all of this one might object that deficient self-esteem does not in itself cause competition. This is quite true. Whereas many psychoanalysts, including Freud himself, tend to inspect the individual in a vacuum, the neo-Freudians have emphasized that human development, intrapsychic conflicts, and everything else take place in a particular environment. In order to do their job adequately, psychologists must be students not only of the individual or the family but of the culture as a whole. Thus we return to the sociological emphasis on norms and structures with which this section began. Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. In our culture, which is wedded to the assumption that life is a zero-sum game, one of the chief mechanisms is competition. It is America’s compensatory mechanism of choice. Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people’s expense. When we have both, we have millions of people who try to feel better by making the next person feel worse.

  Many people insist that they compete because success in our culture demands that they do so. There is considerable truth to this, and, on one level, competing can be viewed as a deliberate strategy. But on another level, striving to outdo others is also the result of psychological needs, and it is in this respect that competing can be said to be unconsciously determined. In fact, these two levels are themselves causally related. The social norms that induce us to compete can shape our psychological state, as I will try to show in the next section. Just asit is important not to wave away structural forces by pretending that the problem is unique to unhealthy individuals, so we must not completely reduce competition to these structural forces, ignoring its psychological basis. The average American does not talk in terms of “structural forces” or “sociohistorical determinants”; she says she competes because s
he fears being left behind if she doesn’t. But this account, while grounded in an accurate reading of our society, is not exhaustive. The urge to become a winner can (and should) also be traced to underlying feelings of worthlessness.

  I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low selfesteem, to argue that our “state religion” is a sign of psychological ill-health—this will not sit well with many people. Yet most of these same people will agree there is something amiss with the fellow who cannot walk into a room without wondering whether he is the strongest or wealthiest, or his date is the prettiest, or his name is the best known. How is it that so many people accept the latter but resist the former?

  The answer lies in the popular assumption that anything which is dangerous or unhealthy in excess is just fine in moderation. While we grow concerned, for example, about the person who can’t function when a loved one leaves for even a short while, we find nothing wrong with wanting to spend some time with one’s beloved. The problem is with the excess, and the extreme version of love (if it can still be called love) could be said to be qualitatively different from more moderate desire.

  But is competition like love? In a society where most of us are somewhat competitive, we like to reassure ourselves by assuming that it is. Actually, though, “moderate” competitiveness and “excessive” competitiveness are only quantitatively, rather than qualitatively, different; their psychological causes are identical. A small handgun may be less noticeable or powerful than a bazooka, but the purpose of the two instruments is essentially the same. The hypercompetitive person may stand out in a crowd because of the urgency of his need to be the best, but the psychological forces at work are no different from those operating in people whose level of competitiveness is judged acceptable. He is just more extreme.

  Imagine a society in which interrupting other people was encouraged—just as competing against other people is encouraged in our own. Suppose further that some people interrupted so frequently and so loudly that they never heard anyone but themselves. These people would likely be criticized and assumed to be neurotic for their need to interrupt in this fashion. Everyone else would be seen as engaging in “healthy” interruption. Leave aside the question of whether interrupting is an unwelcome behavior; we are not dealing here with consequences but only with motivation. What should be clear is that the need to overpower others in conversation once in a while is different only in degree from the need to overpower others in conversation all the time. The psychological source of this behavior does not change with its intensity or frequency. And the same is true of competition.

  If we can use the word unhealthy to describe behavior that is deficit motivated or that arises from low self-esteem, then our startling conclusion must be that “healthy competition” is a contradiction in terms. It is not the excess that is problematic in the relentlessly competitive individual; it is the need to compete in itself. The relentless competitor is simply more noticeable, and he affords us the luxury of condemning him while sparing ourselves. In reality he is but an exaggeration of ourselves. “What we see in neuroses,” said Horney, “is only a magnified picture of what is often normal in a competitive culture.”11 It is rather like the person who unthinkingly cheats on his tax returns but becomes outraged over instances of “real” theft. The big-time thief is really just the ordinary tax cheat writ large. The technique is different, as is the number of zeroes, but the motivation is exactly the same.

  To be sure, we should not pass lightly over the fact that some people are more desperate than others in their need to win. This desperation can be measured in terms of the felt intensity of the drive, the number of arenas in which it is experienced, the amount of pain associated with losing, and so forth. The extremely competitive individual often will project his own view of the world onto the situations he confronts, approaching virtually any environment as if it were objectively set up as a contest. Life is a constant struggle to stay on top, to be number one. Everything is seen in zero-sum terms, so that someone else’s good fortune will occasion his anger or self-pity—as if there were only so much happiness to go around. Even when he is not personally involved, his first inclination will be to construe any situation or encounter he hears about in competitive terms. He assumes others are as competitive as he,12 that rivalry is the way of the world, that his status is always on the line.13 Now obviously not every person with a streak of competitiveness about him is in such dire straits. It makes sense to speak of a continuum: the greater the desperation, the lower the self-esteem, the worse the problem. The point, then, is not that anyone who is at all competitive is in urgent need of psychological help, but rather that significant differences in degree do not always make a difference in kind. The need to be better than others has the same essential psychological origin, regardless of its severity.

  Finally, it should be noted that the need to win and the terror of losing are both exacerbated by the fact that most competitions are public events. It is not the simple fact of victory, the private knowledge of one’s superiority, that is used to overcome doubts about oneself. It is the fact that this victory will be noticed. If competition’s destination is reassurance about oneself, its vehicle is approval from others. Not just winning but the acceptance that is supposedly attendant on winning—this is the appeal of competition. In sports, acceptance may mean the approval of the coach, as former pro football player Dave Meggyesy writes:

  Although I played time and again with injuries, and told myself I was doing this because it was in the best tradition of the game, it was really to get approval from the coaches. . . . We moved in an Oedipal lockstep: the more approval they gave me, the more fanatically I played.14

  The “Oedipal” reference here signifies, of course, that the coach functions as a parent surrogate. In her interviews with competitive swimmers, Jenifer Levin found that “‘love,’ a ‘family,’ the approval of a significant paternal figure . . . came up time and time again when women spoke of the early motivation to compete.”15 The psychoanalytic equation runs something like this: winning = coach’s approval = parent’s acceptance = acceptance of self (self-esteem).

  Often approval is sought from spectators, too, and this is not only true of athletic contests. Other kinds of competition offer the same sort of reinforcement. There are the officemates who quickly learn of one’s promotion, the dinner companions who listen to one’s games of one-upmanship, the other students who see the honor roll posted on the wall. Furthermore, as Stuart Walker observes, competitors seek to be admired and accepted by those they compete against. The competitor “returns to competition repeatedly, and seeks to perform well, partly in order to please them. He knows that all the world loves a winner, and believes that his competitors will love him when he wins.”16 Where there is no love, envy will do. Where approval is not forthcoming, it will simply be assumed. To be number one is, above all, to be noticed, whether by parent, coach, observer, or opponent. To be noticed is to be someone; to be a someone soothes a trembling self-esteem.

  WINNING, LOSING, AND SELF-ESTEEM

  A personality attribute could be considered healthy with regard to its effects even if it seemed unhealthy in light of its motivation. So we ask: Is competitiveness a psychologically constructive force? Does the act of competing strengthen the shaky self-esteem that gave rise to it?

  Such an effect might take place for the simple reason that living up to the norms of one’s culture is rewarding. When we do what is expected of us, we feel better about ourselves, and competitiveness is expected of us in this particular society. Where competition is not the norm, we would expect that this effect would not exist—and we would be right.17 But even in a very competitive society, the cultural norm effect is overshadowed by the dynamics of competition itself. These dynamics, unhappily, have just the opposite result, undermining rather than bolstering self-esteem.

/>   In her studies of children in the mid-1970s, educational psychologist Carole Ames decided to see how children act under competitive conditions. She found that competition can cause people to believe they are not the source of—or in control of—what happens to them.18 Besides its disturbing implications for self-esteem, this “external locus” also inhibits performance, according to Ames. People who do not see themselves as directing their own actions tend to be lower achievers—yet another explanation for the data showing that competition does not lead to higher productivity.

  Other researchers have approached this question by looking for personality attributes that are correlated with competitiveness. This does not prove a causal relation, of course; the other characteristics may even be the reason for competitiveness rather than a result of it. The evidence, however, is highly suggestive. In 1981, two psychologists studied more than 800 high school students to see what other characteristics described those who were competitive. “Students reporting positive attitudes toward competitive relationships with others,” they discovered, “are unique by virtue of their greater dependence on evaluation- and performance-based assessments of personal worth.”19 Far from having unconditional self-esteem, the way the competitive subjects viewed themselves depended inordinately on how well they did at certain tasks and on what others thought of them.

  The studies concerned with structural competition have typically used alternative arrangements—notably cooperation—as points of reference. The question then becomes: which is the better way to elicit the kinds of traits we think of as healthy—by having people compete or cooperate? In a competitive society like ours, it is common to assume that cooperation discourages a strong sense of self, that it has a whiff of dependence about it. In fact, just the opposite seems to be true. From a review of seventeen separate studies, David and Roger Johnson concluded that “cooperative learning situations, compared with competitive and individualistic situations, promote higher levels of self-esteem and healthier processes for deriving conclusions about one’s self-worth.”20 “Cooperativeness,” they have written elsewhere, is “positively related to numerous indexes of psychological health such as emotional maturity, well-adjusted social relations, strong personal identity, and basic trust in and optimism about other people.”21 And while competition promotes an external locus of control, cooperation promotes an internal locus of control.22 Those who work with, rather than against, others feel more in control of their own lives.