No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  109. Lawrence Gonzales, “Airline Safety: A Special Report,” p. 210.

  110. Frederick C. Thayer, “Can Competition Hurt?” p. A17. Paul Wachtel agrees: “It is in the very nature of a system in which one must constantly look over one’s shoulder at the competition that corners will be cut—in design, in information to the public, and in morals” (p. 58). Also see John J. Nance’s recent book Blind Trust for evidence of the safety hazards that have resulted from deregulation of the airline industry.

  111. Wachtel, pp. 68–71 and passim.

  112. Harvey et al., p. 95.

  113. Lawrence K. Frank, pp. 318–23. The last consequence—the suppression of individuality—is not as paradoxical as it may appear. I will return to this issue later.

  114. For a review of the productivity gains enjoyed by cooperatives, see Appendix I in John Simmons and William Mares’s Working Together. Also see Morton Deutsch’s review of the literature in his chapter “Suppose We Took Egalitarianism Seriously?” in Distributive Justice.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Harvey et al., p. 13.

  2. George Leonard, The Ultimate Athlete, p. 128.

  3. Edwards, p. 4.

  4. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: “The ways in which men compete for superiority are as various as the prizes at stake. . . . But in whatever shape it comes, it is always play” (p. 105). And again: “. . . competition implies play” (p. 133).

  5. M. J. Ellis’s Why People Play offers a reasonably good review of selected definitions and theories of play—definitions and theories being difficult to disentangle—although the review is colored by his strong behaviorist bias.

  6. Huizinga, pp. 13, 203.

  7. Chesterton is quoted by Huizinga, p. 197, n.2.

  8. George Herbert Mead saw play as a chance for the child to try on various adult roles (esp. pp. 150, 364–65). See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s bibliographic review (“Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” p. 42).

  9. “The child must somehow distance himself from the content of his unconscious and see it as something external to him, to gain any sort of mastery over it. In normal play, objects such as dolls and toy animals are used to embody various aspects of the child’s personality which are too complex, unacceptable, and contradictory for him to handle” (Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, p. 55).

  10. Orlick, for instance, suggests that we help children play in such a way that they will learn to be honest and cooperative (Winning Through Cooperation, pp. 138–39). It might be noted that such inculcation of values takes place, willy-nilly, whenever we guide—or react to—our children’s play. It is just that we are accustomed to sexist roles, competitive interactions, and so forth, so we are less likely to notice the ways in which most play (as well as stories and films) quietly perpetuates these values.

  11. Whether humans are primarily motivated to reduce tension, as psychoanalysts and behaviorists alike maintain, is actually a controversial question in personality theory. Among those who argue that we evince a “resistance to equilibrium” is Gordon Allport (see, for example, his Becoming).

  12. Huizinga, pp. 197, 199.

  13. See Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports (1976), or John Underwood, Spoiled Sport (1985), for example.

  14. Winer, p. 194.

  15. Novak, p. 218.

  16. Joseph Heller, Something Happened, pp. 221–24.

  17. Ellis, p. 140.

  18. Günther Lüschen, “The Interdependence of Sport and Culture,” p. 127.

  19. Edwards, pp. 47–48.

  20. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, p. 182.

  21. Sadler, p. 169.

  22. Reagan is quoted by Brenda Jo Bredemeier and David L. Shields, “Values and Violence in Sports Today,” p. 23.

  23. Gai Ingham Berlage, “Are Children’s Competitive Team Sports Socializing Agents for Corporate America?” pp. 313–14, 331.

  24. “Sport is a primary vehicle through which youth are socialized to accept and internalize American values,” wrote D. Stanley Eitzen. “Thus, sport is viewed as the darling of the conservatives and the culprit of radicals” (Sport and Contemporary Society, p. 90). Gerald Ford could be added to the list of conservative defenders of competition. “Broadly speaking,” he wrote while president, “outside of a national character and an educated society, there are few things more important to a country’s growth and well-being than competitive athletics” (“In Defense of the Competitive Urge,” p. 17). The mention of regional differences in sport appreciation is based on Gallup Poll results, cited in Edwards, p. 92.

  25. George H. Sage, “American Values and Sport: Formation of a Bureaucratic Personality,” pp. 42, 44.

  26. Riesman cited in Tutko and Bruns, p. 42.

  27. Arnold V. Talentino has discussed this issue in “The Sports Record Mania: An Aspect of Alienation.”

  28. George W. Morgan, The Human Predicament, esp. pp. 82–93. Alongside the prosaic man’s predilection for quantification, according to Morgan, is his inability to tolerate ambiguity or uniqueness, his fascination with technique, and his need to classify (and, finally, to control) whatever he experiences. The poet e.e. cummings was characteristically more blunt: “Nothing measurable matters a good goddam.”

  29. Cited in Tutko and Bruns, p. 206.

  30. Ibid., p. 205.

  31. Stuart H. Walker, Winning, p. 58.

  32. Leonard, p. 47. “But,” he continues, “when the seasoning is mistaken for substance, only sickness can follow” (ibid.).

  33. Betty Lehan Harragan, Games Mother Never Taught You, p. 78.

  34. This idea represents an important part of each psychologist’s thought and is consequently discussed in many of their respective works. See, for example, Maslow’s Religion, Values, and Peak-Experiences; Lifton’s The Life of the Self, pp. 33–34: and Csikszentmihalyi’s “Play and Intrinsic Rewards.”

  35. Walker, p. 3.

  36. Novak, pp. 47–49, 222–31.

  37. Gary Warner, Competition, p. 30.

  38. Giamatti is quoted by John Underwood, “A Game Plan for America,” p. 67. In Toward a Philosophy of Sport, Harold J. Vanderzwaag tried to develop an explicitly existentialist justification for sports, but he based this on the mistaken view that existentialism is a philosophy of individualism and the present moment. (Regarding this confusion, see my essay, “Existentialism Here and Now,” esp. pp. 381–88.)

  39. Sadler, pp. 173–74. Whether we can reasonably speak of sports achieving these goals without competition is questionable, given our nomenclature. For “sports” in his quotation, read: “types of recreation” or “ways to have fun.”

  40. Russell, Conquest of Happiness, p. 55.

  41. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, pp. 131, 129–30.

  42. Johnson and Johnson, “Structure,” p. 224.

  43. Schmitt, p. 672.

  44. Tutko and Bruns, p. 202; emphasis in original. This is the thrust of the authors’ entire last chapter, “Alternate [mc] Models and Approaches.”

  45. Howard S. Slusher, Man, Sport and Existence, p. 148.

  46. This view is shared by Theodore F. Lentz and Ruth Cornelius (“All Together: A Manual of Cooperative Games,” p. 12).

  47. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, p. 33.

  48. The examples that follow in the text substantiate this. Rivka R. Eifermann’s study of some 14,000 Israeli children decisively refutes the belief of Piaget and others that “rules and competition necessarily go together.” She points to the existence of “cooperative rule-governed games” as well as “individual games governed by rules” (pp. 276, 278). Interestingly, Eifermann’s exhaustive study also found, “contrary to Piaget’s explicit statement . . . and, indeed, to what is probably a rather general assumption, [that] there is a relative decline in participation” in competitive, rule-governed games as children grow older, after reaching a peak in fourth grade (ibid., pp. 279–80). In his review of Eifermann’s work, M. J. Ellis explains that “the uncertainty inherent in t
raversing from response to outcome is motivating in itself, and sustains much of the behavior of older children. They do not need explicit rules and competitions to govern their play behavior” (p. 69).

  49. Carroll, p. 33.

  50. Lentz and Cornelius, p. 4.

  51. Orlick, The Cooperative Sports and Games Book, p. 52.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, p. 86 and passim.

  2. Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, p. 351. That high self-esteem is a prerequisite for, rather than mutually exclusive with, healthy relationships is worth emphasizing. The adage that one cannot love others without first loving oneself is largely true, but this in no way diminishes the importance of loving others. One of the most popular books on the subject in recent years is Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem, which is grounded in Ayn Rand’s glorification of selfishness. Her crude pop-philosophy, with all its reactionary political implications, is hardly a necessary counterpart to an emphasis on self-esteem. Erich Fromm, in fact, has shown how self-esteem and selfishness are actually opposites (see Man for Himself, pp. 124–45). Sociologist Samuel Oliner is now in the process of studying altruistic behavior during World War II. Provisional findings confirm that “a strong sense of self-worth and security [is] the psychological base from which people [can] reach out to help others” (Daniel Goleman, “Great Altruists: Science Ponders Soul of Goodness”).

  3. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, p. 45. The other leading figure in humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, has throughout his work stressed the importance of unconditional self-esteem, correlating this with psychological health and describing how its development requires unconditional acceptance by others (see, for example, “A Theory of Personality”).

  4. Miles Hewstone, Attribution Theory: Social and Functional Extensions, p. 17. Marie Jahoda similarly notes that “the most common proposal in the mental health literature is that [the individual] should accept himself.” Such self-acceptance typically implies “a global benevolent view of the whole self, a positive feeling that pervades and integrates all other aspects of the self-concept” (Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health, pp. 28–29).

  5. Lawrence K. Frank, p. 322.

  6. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, chapter 3; The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, chapters 9 and 20.

  7. Hal Gabriel is quoted in Susan Orlean, “Taking It to the Limit,” p. 45.

  8. Bruce C. Ogilvie and Thomas A. Tutko, “Sport: If You Want to Build Character, Try Something Else,” p. 63.

  9. See Morris Rosenberg, Society and the Adolescent Self-Image, p. 227.

  10. See John J. Vance and Bert O. Richmond, “Cooperative and Competitive Behavior as a Function of Self-Esteem”; and Marianne W. DeVoe, “Cooperation as a Function of Self-Concept, Sex and Race.”

  11. Horney, Neurotic Personality, p. 173. Thus, “In the general competitive struggle that takes place in our culture even the normal person is likely to show . . . destructive impulses involved in the neurotic striving for power, prestige and possession” (p. 167).

  12. See p. 30.

  13. For the theologian C. S. Lewis, this sort of competitiveness is closely related to the sin of pride: “Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature—while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. . . . Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone” (Mere Christianity, p. 95).

  14. Dave Meggyesy, Out of Their League, pp. 79, 12.

  15. Levin, p. 93.

  16. Walker, p. 193.

  17. This is, in fact, just what Spencer Kagan and George P. Knight found. See their “Cooperation-Competition and Self-Esteem: A Case of Cultural Relativism.”

  18. Carole Ames, “Children’s Achievement Attributions and Self-Reinforcement: Effects of Self-Concept and Competitive Reward Structure” (hereafter “Achievement”), p. 353. The “locus of control” paradigm, still very popular in social psychology, was originated by Julian Rotter.

  19. Ardyth A. Norem-Hebeisen and D. W. Johnson, “The Relationship Between Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Attitudes and Differentiated Aspects of Self-Esteem,” p. 420.

  20. Johnson, Johnson, and Geoffrey Maruyama, “Interdependence and Interpersonal Attraction Among Heterogeneous and Homogeneous Individuals,” p. 35.

  21. Johnson and Johnson, “Crisis,” p. 140. Among the studies they cite is the one by Norem-Hebeisen and Johnson mentioned above. That study found a sharp contrast between the dependency and conditional selfesteem of competitive students, on the one hand, and the “greater personal expressiveness (basic acceptance) and . . . high sense of general well-being” of cooperative students, on the other (p. 420).

  22. Johnson, Johnson, and Linda Scott, “The Effects of Cooperative and Individualized Instruction on Student Attitudes and Achievement,” p. 212. This study did not include a competitive arrangement; the comparison is with independent learning. Other research corroborates the view that independent learning is the worst of the three alternatives with respect to psychological health.

  23. Aronson, p. 210.

  24. Ruth P. Rubinstein, “Changes in Self-Esteem and Anxiety in Competitive and Noncompetitive Camps.”

  25. Deutsch, “Distributive Justice,” p. 399.

  26. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, p. 121.

  27. Walker, pp. 111, 250. Walker is talking about competitive athletics, but the psychoanalyst Rollo May came to the same conclusion regarding competition in the marketplace: “Any failure in the competitive struggle is a threat to the quasi-esteem for one’s self. . . . This obviously leads to powerful feelings of helplessness and inferiority” (The Meaning of Anxiety, p. 196).

  28. Ames, “Achievement,” p. 350.

  29. Ibid., p. 353.

  30. Frank Ryan, Sports and Psychology, p. 205.

  31. Leonard, p. 46; emphasis in original.

  32. Ruben, p. 147. Other students of competition have sounded the same theme. Writes Lawrence Frank: “Competition denies any status that can be considered terminal, hence the competitors, while always setting goals for themselves, are forced to a continual rejection of those goals when attained, in favor of a more remote goal” (p. 320). And sports psychologists Tutko and Bruns put the matter starkly: “No matter at what level we compete and in whatever sport [or other activity, we might add], when we attain a goal we simply move it up another notch, hunting for a perfection that is always just out of reach. Winning, in fact, is like drinking salt water; it will never quench your thirst. It is an insatiable greed. There are never enough victories. . . . Freud would have clearly defined our behavior as a repetition compulsion because there is no moment where the winner can feel, ‘I’ve made it’” (pp. 2–3).

  33. Mark Spitz is quoted in Walker, p. 38.

  34. Walker, p. 37.

  35. Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach, Understanding Women: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach, p. 142.

  36. Butt, p. 54.

  37. Edwards, p. 103.

  38. Douglas MacArthur is quoted in Moore, p. 73.

  39. Ogilvie and Tutko, pp. 61, 63.

  40. Richard W. Eggerman, “Competition as a Mixed Good,” p. 48. His piece was intended as a rebuttal to my article, “Why Competition?”

  41. New York Times story: “Team Play Drawback for Young.”

  42. Johnson and Johnson, “Structuring Conflict in Science Classrooms,” p. 12.

  43. Rosenberg, p. 281.

  44. Eggerman, p. 49.

  45. Ibid., p. 50.

  46. Ellen Sherberg, “The Thrill of Competition,” in Seventeen.

  47. Walker, p. 110.

  48. May and Doob are quoted in Pepitone, p. 16.

  49. John R. Seeley et al., Crestwood Heights: A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life, pp. 829–30.

  50. Vance and Richmond, p. 225.

  51. Gregory Bates
on and his associates coined the term “double-bind” to refer to the phenomenon of giving two mutually exclusive messages so that the recipient cannot carry out both (see Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia”).

  52. Novak, p. 47. Psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin agrees: “In games the competition may be playful, but the agony is real and the anger is there” [The Rage Within, p. 35).

  53. Harvey et al., pp. 74–75.

  54. The study by G. M. Vaught and S. F. Newman, entitled “The Effect of Anxiety on Motor Steadiness in Competitive and Non-Competitive Conditions,” is cited by Johnson and Bryant, p. 173.

  55. Haines and McKeachie, pp. 389–90.

  56. Tutko and Bruns, p. 79.

  57. See, for example, Roy F. Baumeister, “Choking Under Pressure: SelfConsciousness and Paradoxical Effects of Incentives on Skillful Performance.” The author argues as follows: “Competition is arousing; arousal heightens self-consciousness; and self-consciousness disrupts performance of some tasks” (p. 610).

  58. Horney, Neurotic Personality, p. 18s.

  59. Ibid., p. 167.

  60. Rollo May, p. 173.

  61. Ibid., p. 191.

  62. Ibid., p. 233.

  63. Ibid., pp. 233–34.

  64. Walker, p. 235.

  65. Rollo May, pp. 87–88.

  66. Herbert Hendin, Suicide in America, p. 30.

  67. Hendin, Age of Sensation, pp. 167–70.

  68. Jane E. Brody, “Heart Attacks: Turmoil Beneath the Calm,” p. C5.

  69. Sadler, p. 172.

  70. Butt, p. 41.

  71. Srully Blotnick, Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Career Women, pp. 108–9.

  72. Strick, pp. 83–84.

  73. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, p. 37.

  74. Leonard, “Winning Isn’t Everything. It’s Nothing,” p. 46. Also see Leonard’s remarks on this subject in his Education and Ecstasy, pp. 82, 181. Parenti, too, goes on to observe that in our conformist version of individualism, “Everyone competes against everyone else but for the same goals and with the same values in mind” (p. 37).

  75. Combs, Myths in Education, p. 19. Lawrence Frank makes essentially the same point about economic competition: “The usual defense of‘rugged individualism’ is that competitive striving stimulates initiative and individuality. But it is evident that competition, by forcing each competitor to engage in activities that are prescribed by the other competitors and are stereotyped by the rules of the legal-economic game, actually suppresses individuality; the individual cannot vary or depart except in terms of intensity and magnitude, or lack of scruples, since competition means striving to defeat or outdo others in a narrowly restricted pattern of activity” (p. 318; emphasis in original).