No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  11. “The fantasy material elicited from women by the story-telling technique has relatively little relationship to a gender-differentiating personality characteristic but instead largely reflects the respondents’ perceptions of society’s current sex-role attitudes and their expectations about the consequences of role conformity or violation under the particular circumstances described in the verbal cue. With greater societal acceptance of women’s educational and vocational aspirations, sex differences in fear-of-success studies appear to be evaporating” (Spence and Helmreich, “Achievement-related,” p. 37).

  12. Horner, “Femininity and Successful Achievement,” p. 54.

  13. The study, by Miron Zuckerman and S. N. Alison, is cited by Georgia Sassen in “Success Anxiety in Women: A Constructivist Interpretation of Its Source and Its Significance,” p. 16.

  14. Sassen, ibid.

  15. Sassen, “Sex Role Orientation, Sex Differences and Concept of Success,” pp. 56–57.

  16. Horner, “Femininity and Successful Achievement,” p. 67.

  17. Maccoby and Jacklin, Psychology of Sex Differences, p. 351.

  18. Horner, “Femininity and Successful Achievement,” p. 61.

  19. Sassen, “Success Anxiety in Women," p. 15.

  20. Sherberg, “Thrill of Competition.”

  21. Psychiatrist Carlotta Miles is quoted by Judy Bachrach in “Rivalry in the Sisterhood,” p. 58.

  22. Susan Brownmiller describes such traditional kinds of competition among women in her book Femininity.

  23. Jane Gross, “Against the Odds: A Woman’s Ascent on Wall Street,” p. 18.

  24. Ibid., p. 21. “I’m not in this to be a nice guy; I’m too profit-oriented,” Valenstein adds (p. 68).

  25. Sandra Salmans, “Women Dressing to Succeed Think Twice About the Suit,” p. A1.

  26. Anne Taylor Fleming, “Women and the Spoils of Success,” p. 30.

  27. Anita Diamant, “The Women’s Sports Revolution,” pp. 21, 20.

  28. In The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Nancy Chodorow offers a persuasive account of how women come to incline toward relationship. Her theory, which concerns early-life experiences and specifically addresses the question of which parent bears the responsibility for caring for infants, has influenced Carol Gilligan and Georgia Sassen, among others.

  29. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, p. 26.

  30. Ibid., p. 19.

  31. Derber, chapter 2.

  32. Don Zimmerman and Candace West, “Sex Roles, Interruptions, and Silences in Conversation.”

  33. Pamela Fishman, “Interaction: The Work Women Do.”

  34. Ibid., p. 405.

  35. Robin Lakoff, personal communication, 1984.

  36. Barrie Thorne, personal communication, 1984.

  37. Sassen, “Success Anxiety in Women,” pp. 21–22. Gilligan similarly writes that “the observation that women’s embeddedness in lives of relationship, their orientation to interdependence, their subordination of achievement to care, and their conflicts over competitive success leave them personally at risk in mid-life seems more a commentary on the society than a problem in women’s development” (pp. 170–71).

  CHAPTER 9

  1. Deutsch, Distributive Justice, p. 196.

  2. Wachtel, p. 144.

  3. Ibid., p. 174.

  4. Philip G. Zimbardo et al., “The Psychology of Imprisonment: Privation, Power, and Pathology.” The quotations are taken from pp. 282–85. Zimbardo cites a similar study, conducted by N. J. Orlando, in which personnel from a psychiatric hospital who agreed to play the role of mental patients for a weekend soon displayed the behaviors found among such patients: fighting, pacing, uncontrollable weeping, and so on (p. 284).

  5. Harvey et al., pp. 23, 95.

  6. Sadler, p. 168.

  7. Deutsch, Distributive Justice, p. 154.

  8. Shirk, Competitive Comrades, esp. pp. 161–62.

  9. Boston, which by some measures is the most dangerous U.S. city in which to drive, offers a good case study. See my article “Stop!” for an analysis of these issues.

  10. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, pp. 155–56.

  11. Paul E. Breer and Edwin C. Locke, Task Experience as a Source of Attitudes, p. 271.

  12. Axelrod, chapter 4. The quotations are from p. 85.

  13. The style of presentation in this section was suggested by Jay Haley’s essay, “The Art of Being a Failure as a Therapist.”

  14. For a very provocative essay on the implicit conservatism of humanistic psychology, see chapter 3 of Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia. “One helps oneself because collective help is inadmissible; in rejecting the realm of social and political praxis, individual helplessness is redoubled and soothes itself through self-help, hobbies, and how-to manuals. . . . The reality of violence and destruction, of psychically and physically damaged people, is not merely glossed over, but buried beneath the lingo of self, meaning, authenticity, personality” (pp. 51, 57). Jacoby is much less persuasive when he extends his indictment to take in the neo-Freudians and, for that matter, every variety of psychology except for orthodox psychoanalysis.

  15. On the subject of realists and Utopians, the philosopher Hazel Barnes has written, “We should not be afraid of the Utopian in our thinking, for it is only belief in the possibility of what has not yet been attained which makes progress even conceivable. A willingness to rethink all of our aims and to throw the whole system into question will prevent our painting the walls when we ought to be getting rid of the termites and strengthening the foundations” (An Existentialist Ethics, p. 306). C. Wright Mills addressed the same issue: “What is ‘practical’ and what is ‘utopian’? Does not utopian mean merely: whatever acknowledges other values as relevant and possibly even as sovereign? But in truth, are not those who in the name of realism act like crackpots, are they not the Utopians? Are we not now in a situation in which the only practical, realistic down-to-earth thinking and acting is just what these crackpot realists call ‘utopian’?” (Power, Politics, and People, p. 402). Erich Fromm, Jonathan Schell, and Paul Wachtel have all expressed similar sentiments.

  16. Fred M. Hechinger, “Experts Call a Child’s Play Too Serious to Be Left to Adults,” p. C4.

  17. In his account of how we compete in conversation, Charles Derber remarks that “the allocation of attention inevitably mirrors the basic structure of the society in which it evolves; it can thus assume a new form only if fundamental social change occurs. . . . Where norms of self-interest govern economic behavior, face-to-face social behavior is invariably egoistic and competitive” (p. 88). Paul Hoch similarly observes that sports mirror the larger society (p. 10), while Robert Paul Wolff argues that “only a social revolution of the most far-reaching sort” will allow schooling to be noncompetitive (The Ideal of the University, p. 68).

  18. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, p. 138.

  19. Wolff, especially pp. 143, 149.

  20. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy. Also see Jane J. Mansbridge’s discussion of these issues in Beyond Adversary Democracy.

  21. Deutsch, Distributive Justice, p. 281.

  22. Lawrence K. Frank, p. 322.

  23. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, R. D. Laing, p. 96.

  CHAPTER 10

  1. For a cogent discussion of how competitive classroom games are both unnecessary and destructive—followed by suggestions for the kinds of games that might replace them—see Mara Sapon-Shevin, “Cooperative Instructional Games: Alternatives to the Spelling Bee.” One of Sapon-Shevin’s major points is that the anger and hurt feelings that so often attend these games do not reflect failings of the individual children but follow from the competitive structure of the games themselves.

  2. Spencer Kagan quoted in Ron Brandt, “On Cooperative Learning: A Conversation with Spencer Kagan," p. 8. Elsewhere, Kagan has observed that teachers who make public the achievement of their students set up the conditions for competition even if that is not their intent. This
would include posting either tests and papers that have been graded or charts with names and scores (Kagan et al., “Classroom Structural Bias,” p. 279). We might add to this list the repugnant practice of announcing each student’s score on a test or paper as it is handed back.

  3. The third edition of that book, Learning Together and Alone, was published in 1991.

  4. Lilya Wagner, Peer Teaching: Historical Perspectives. Also see Shlomo Sharan, “The Group Investigation Approach to Cooperative Learning,” p. 30.

  5. For a discussion of the difference between cooperation and altruism, see my article “Cooperation: What It Means and Doesn’t Mean.”

  6. Shlomo Sharan, however, has argued forcefully that “whole-class instruction should be retired as the primary mode of teaching, and, at best, should occupy a fraction of the time it presently occupies in the instructional repertoire of teachers.” Eschewing the qualifiers that typically mute the impact of recommendations offered in academic essays, Sharan declares that whole-class teaching “often generates . . . social distance between peers in the classroom and between those from different ethnic groups in particular, insidious social comparison processes, more tightly knit cliques in classrooms, and many more students at the lower levels of achievement. . . . The fact is that cooperative learning can be implemented only to the extent that traditional whole-class teaching is supplanted, not just altered!” (“Cooperative Learning,” p. 298).

  7. Robert Slavin, Cooperative Learning, p. 44.

  8. David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson, Cooperation and Competition, p. 158. These numbers reflect measures of overall self-esteem. Of the studies that found a difference on measures of task or academic selfesteem in particular, twenty-three favored cooperation and one favored competition. Of the studies that compared cooperative and individualistic arrangements on overall self-esteem, thirty-nine found an advantage for the former and three for the latter.

  9. “If we want to enhance self-esteem, we must first check to see whether the social environment is safe for the individual. A debilitating environment is likely to squash fledgling self-confidence no matter how much we exhort the individual to persist. . . . Moreover, suggesting that self-esteem can be preserved by developing ‘coping skills’ endorses the status quo” (James A. Beane, “Sorting Out the Self-Esteem Controversy,” p. 27). Also see a thoughtful essay by Ellen Herman, “Toward a Politics of Self-Esteem?”

  10. The work of Ruth C. Wylie is especially useful for understanding the peculiar characteristics and weaknesses of some of the many instruments used to measure self-esteem.

  11. For an account of “the role education itself has played in causing students to fail” (p. xiii) and to feel like failures, see William Glasser, Schools Without Failure.

  12. Johnson, quoted in my article “It’s Hard to Get Left Out of a Pair,” p. 54.

  13. Johnson and Johnson, Cooperation and Competition, chap. 7; Slavin, Cooperative Learning, chap. 3.

  14. Johnson and Johnson, Cooperation and Competition, p. 122.

  15. Carol Hymowitz, “Five Main Reasons Why Managers Fail.”

  16. Slavin, Cooperative Learning, chap. 2.

  17. Johnson and Johnson, Cooperation and Competition, pp. 40–41. Those studies in which the subjects cooperated within their groups but the groups competed against each other found less of a benefit than those in which there was no intergroup competition. In seven studies that directly compared cooperation with and without intergroup competition, no differences were found. The Johnsons’ conclusion is that having groups compete against each other “does not enhance achievement and may decrease it” (p. 46). (For a fuller discussion of the achievement effects of competition, see chapters 3 and 4 of their book.)

  18. Johnson and Johnson, Learning Together and Alone, p. 40.

  19. Richard J. Light, The Harvard Assessment Seminars, pp. 6, 21, 64–65. The science courses that students rated highest and lowest in overall quality had almost identical work loads. What distinguished the lowest-rated courses was more intense competition for grades.

  20. For more on the destructive effects of extrinsic motivators than the brief remarks on pp. 59–61, see my article “Group Grade Grubbing versus Cooperative Learning.” Three indispensable books on the topic are The Hidden Costs of Rewards (edited by Mark R. Lepper and David Greene), Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan), and The Competitive Ethos and Democratic Education (by John G. Nicholls).

  21. See especially the work of Carole Ames and her colleagues listed in the reference section, some of which I described in earlier chapters.

  22. This dynamic was noticed by a researcher as early as 1932: “Generally, the usual classroom incentives call forth a response for maximum exertion only from the few very able pupils, while the majority of the pupils, knowing that their chances for excelling are limited, fail to be motivated to do their very best” (Joseph Zubin, Some Effects of Incentives, p. 50).

  23. R. E. Slavin, “Cooperative Learning and the Cooperative School,” p. 9.

  24. David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson, “Motivational Processes in Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Learning Situations,” p. 272. Slavin, by contrast, reports mixed results from questionnaires that ask children whether they like class during CL sessions (Cooperative Learning, pp. 48–49). He suggests that this may be due in part to some of the surveys having tapped students’ genera! feelings about school rather than their relative preference for different classroom approaches. Here is another explanation for his ambiguous findings: the version of CL that Slavin uses (and tends to rely on in his research reports) depends on rewards to foster interdependence. We might expect, based on the documented consequences of using extrinsic motivators, that the enthusiasm generated by CL would be canceled out by the reduced interest in tasks for which a goody is offered. If this is true, then models of CL that do not reward children to get them to work together would be expected to produce much more enthusiasm than other approaches.

  25. Sharan, “Cooperative Learning,” p. 288.

  26. John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School, pp. 232, 233.

  27. Ibid., pp. 229, 233.

  28. “The subject of student boredom in school in general, and under varying instructional conditions in particular, has yet to be studied systematically. It is almost as if this topic was purposefully shunned by educational researchers!” (Sharan, “Cooperative Learning,” p. 287).

  29. David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec, Circles of Learning, p. 65.

  30. In addition to the sources cited below, see the discussions of this question in Bonnie K. Nastasi and Douglas H. Clements, “Research on Cooperative Learning,” pp. 117–20, 124–26; Sharan, “Cooperative Learning,” pp. 289–91; and Noreen M. Webb, “Peer Interaction and Learning in Small Groups.”

  31. See Noreen M. Webb, “Student Interaction and Learning in Small Groups,” “Peer Interaction and Learning in Small Groups,” and virtually any of her other articles and chapters for further findings regarding the conditions that must be present for peer teaching to benefit the giver and recipient of help.

  32. Hugh C. Foot et al., “Theoretical Issues in Peer Tutoring,” p. 72. Tutoring can also enhance the self-esteem, social skills, and motivation of the tutor.

  33. Carl A. Benware and Edward L. Deci, “Quality of Learning with an Active Versus Passive Motivational Set.”

  34. Gerald W. Foster and John E. Penick, “Creativity in a Cooperative Group Setting.”

  35. Johnson and Johnson, Cooperation and Competition, p. 48.

  36. This notion of learning through encounters with conflicting points of view is at the core of Jean Piaget’s approach to cognitive development and, following his work, the model of learning known as constructivism. For a recent elaboration of this theory from another Swiss researcher, see Willem Doise, “The Development of Individual Competencies through Social Interaction.”

  37. Michael Marland, a B
ritish educator, is quoted in Joan Green and John Myers, “Conversations,” p. 330.

  38. Judy Clarke, “The Hidden Treasure of Co-operative Learning,” p. 3.

  39. Robert Bellah et al., The Good Society, pp. 172, 176.

  40. For one discussion on this topic, see Johnson and Johnson, Learning Together and Alone, p. 64.

  41. Webb, “Student Interaction and Learning in Small Groups,” pp. 165–67.

  42. For some concrete suggestions on random-assignment procedures, see Dee Dishon and Pat Wilson O’Leary, “Tips for Heterogeneous Group Selection.”

  43. For a thorough discussion of different kinds of learning groups, see Judy Clarke et al., Together We Learn, chaps. 3 and 4.

  44. Johnson and Johnson, Learning Together and Alone, p. 146. Also see their Circles of Learning, pp. 80–85; Clarke et al., Together We Learn, chap. 5; and two papers by Nancy B. Graves and Theodore D. Graves: “Creating a Cooperative Learning Environment” and “Should We Teach Cooperative Skills as a Part of Each Cooperative Lesson?”

  45. Selma Wassermann, “Children Working in Groups? It Doesn’t Work!” pp. 203–204.

  46. See Johnson and Johnson, Learning Together and Alone, pp. 58–59. For an example of research supporting the value of group processing, see Stuart Yager et al., “The Impact of Group Processing on Achievement in Cooperative Learning Groups.”

  47. Kipling D. Williams and Steven J. Karau, “Social Loafing and Social Compensation,” p. 570.

  48. Besides asking “accountable to whom?” we might ask “accountable with respect to what?” For one group of researchers, individual accountability is defined “in terms of operating in accordance with the norms of a classroom community . . . rather than in terms of performance on achievement tests” (Erna Yackel et al., “Small Group Interactions as a Source of Learning Opportunities in Second-Grade Mathematics,” p. 398).