No Contest: A Case Against Competition
by Alfie Kohn
from New Age Journal, September/October 1986, pp. 18-20
This is a very short condensed article about Alfie Kohn's No Contest: The Case
Against Competition, published in 1986.
The tension between you and your spouse at breakfast this morning was
part of a running argument about who is giving more in the relationship. A
few hours later at the office you eye a colleague warily, wondering
whether she will snatch that promotion from under your nose. Playing
tennis after work, you are again amazed at how unrecognizable your
closest friend seems on the court, because he will do anything to win. At
home you find your child in tears: this afternoon at school she was
eliminated from a spelling bee in the first round. That night on the evening
news you hear about a medical researcher who admitted to fabricating his
data so he could stay ahead.
Because these events take place in different arenas of our lives, it is easy
to overlook their common denominator: competition. All reflect our
culture's obsession with winning. Competition is so pervasive, in fact-infecting the workplace and the classroom, the playing field and the
family--that many of us take it for granted, failing to notice its destructive
consequences.
Competition can be defined as "mutually exclusive goal attainment": my
success requires your failure; our fates are negatively linked. Put
differently, two or more individuals are trying to achieve a goal that
cannot be attained by both or all of them. The all too familiar pressure to
be number one grows out of this arrangement. We have become
accustomed to living with it and quick to defend it. We have been trained,
in effect, not only to compete, but to believe there is value in doing so.
I have spent the last few years examining the arguments used to support
competition and sorting through the evidence from various disciplines. My
research has convinced me that these arguments are really myths--that
competition is neither necessary nor desirable. In the order of their
popularity, here are the four central myths of competition and what the
research actually shows.
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Myth 1: Competition Is Inevitable
As with a range of other unsavory behaviors, we are fond of casually
attributing competition to something called "human nature." Since this
account is so popular, you might expect that there is considerable evidence
to support it. In fact, it is difficult to find a single serious defense of the
claim--let alone any hard data to back it up. It is not difficult at all,
however, to come up with reasons to doubt that competition is inevitable.
We in the United States often assume that our desperate quest to triumph
over others is universal. But half a century ago Margaret Mead and her
colleagues found that competition was virtually unknown to the Zuni and
Iroquois in North America and to the Bathonga of South Africa. Since
then, cross-cultural observers have confirmed that our society is the
exception rather than the rule. From the Inuit of Canada to the Tangu of
New Guinea, from kihbutzniks in lsrael to farmers in Mexico, cooperation
is prized and competition generally avoided.
Working with seven to nine-year olds, psychologists Spencer Kagan and
Millard Madsen found that Mexican children quickly figured out how to
cooperate on an experimental game, while those from the United States
could not. In fact, 78 percent of the Anglo-American children took another
child’s toy away “for apparently no other reason than to prevent the other
child from having it.” Mexican children did so only half as often.
Such findings strongly suggest that competition is a matter of social
training and culture rather than a built-in feature of our nature. Further
evidence comes from classroom experiments in which children have been
successfully taught to cooperate. Gerald Sagotsky and his colleagues at
Adelphi University, for example, trained 118 pairs of first- through third
grade students to work together instead of competing at a variety of tasks.
Seven weeks later a new experimenter introduced a new game to these
children and found that the lesson had stuck with them. Other researchers
have shown that children taught to play cooperative games will continue
to do so on their own time. And children and adults alike express a strong
preference for the cooperative approach once they see firsthand what it is
like to learn or work or play in an environment that doesn't require
winners and losers.
Myth 2: Competition Keeps Productivity High and is Necessary for
Excellence
It is widely assumed that competition boosts achievement and brings out
the best in us--that without it life would be “a bland experience" and we
would become "a waveless sea of nonachievers," as Spiro Agnew once put
it. Many people who make such claims, however, confuse success with
competition--even though the two concepts are quite different. I can
succeed in knitting a scarf or writing a book without ever worrying
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whether it is better than yours. Or I can work with you--say, to write a
report or build a house.
Which method is more productive--competition or cooperation? The
answer will take many by surprise. David and Roger Johnson, brothers
who are educators at the University of Minnesota, recently analyzed 122
studies of classroom achievement conducted from 1924 to 1980. Sixty five
found that cooperation promotes higher achievement than competition,
eight found the reverse, and thirty-six found no significant difference. One
after another, researchers across the country have come to the same
conclusion: Children do not learn better when education is transformed
into a competitive struggle.
In the late 70s Robert Helmreich of the University of Texas at Austin and
his colleagues decided to see whether this was also true in the “real
world.” They gave personality tests to 103 male scientists and found that
those whose work was cited most often by their colleagues (a reasonable
measure of achievement) were those who enjoyed challenging tasks but
were not personally competitive. To make sure this surprising result wasn't
a fluke, Helmreich conducted similar studies on businessmen, academic
psychologists, undergraduates, pilots, and airline reservation agents. Each
time he found the same thing: a significant negative correlation between
competitiveness and achievement.
On reflection, these results--and similar findings from scores of other
studies in the workplace and the classroom--make perfect sense. First of
all, trying to do well and trying to beat others really are two different
things. A child sits in class, waving her arm wildly to attract the teacher’s
attention. When she is finally called on, she seems befuddled and asks,
"Um, what was the question again?” Her mind is on edging out her
classmates, not on the subject matter. These two goals often pull in
opposite directions.
Furthermore. competition is highly stressful: the possibility of failure
creates agitation if not outright anxiety, and this interferes with
performance. Competition also makes it difficult to share our skills,
experiences, and resources--as we can with cooperation.
All of this should lead us to ask hard questions not only about how we
grade--or degrade--students and organize our offices, but also about the
adversarial model on which our legal system is based and, indeed, about
an economic system rooted in competition.
Myth 3: Recreation Requires Competition
It is remarkable, when you stop to think about it, that the American way to
have a good time is to play (or watch) highly structured games in which
one individual or team must triumph over another. Grim, determined
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athletes memorize plays and practice to the point of exhaustion in order to
beat an opposing team--this is often as close as our culture gets to a spirit
of play.
Children, too, are pitted against one another as they conduct serious business on Little League fields. Sports psychologist Terry Orlick observed
that such activities often leave their mark on young participants. "For
many children,” he wrote, “competitive sports operate as a failure factory
that not only effectively eliminates the 'bad ones' but also turns off many
of the 'good ones'... In North America it is not uncommon to lose from 8O
to 90 percent of our registered organized sports participants by fifteen
years of age." Research in nonrecreational settings clearly shows that
those who are not successful in initial competitions continue to perform
poorly and drop out when given the chance.
Even the youngest children get the message, as is obvious from the game
of musical chairs, an American classic. X number of players scramble for
X minus-one chairs when the music stops. Each round eliminates one
player and one chair until finally a single triumphant winner emerges.
Everyone else has lost and been excluded from play for varying lengths of
time. This is our idea of how children should have fun.
Reflecting on the game, Orlick came up with an alternative: what if the
players instead tried in squeeze onto fewer and fewer chairs until finally a
group of giggling kids was crowded on a single chair? Thus is born a new
game--one without winners and losers. The larger point is this: All games
simply require achieving a goal by overcoming some obstacle. Nowhere is
it written that the obstacle must be other people; it can be a time limit or
something intrinsic to the task itself--so that no win-lose framework is
required. We can even set up playful tasks so everyone works together to
achieve a goal--in which case opponents become partners.
Myth 4: Competition Builds Character
Some people defend striving against others as a way to become “stronger.”
Learning how to win and lose is supposed to toughen us and give us
confidence. Yet most at us sense intuitively that the consequences of
struggling to be number one are generally unhealthy. As the
anthropologist Jules Henry put it, “a competitive culture endures by
tearing people down."
To a large extent, we compete to reassure ourselves that we are capable
and basically good. Tragically, though, competing does nothing to
strengthen the shaky self-esteem that gave rise to it. The potential for humiliation, for being exposed as inadequate, is present in every competitive
encounter.
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Trying to outperform others is damaging--first of all, because most of us
lose most of the time. Even winning doesn't help, because self-esteem is
made to depend on the outcome at a contest, whereas psychological health
implies an unconditional sense of trust in oneself. Moreover, victory is
never permanent. King of the Mountain is more than a child's game; it is
the prototype for all competition, since winning promptly establishes one
as the target for one's rivals. In any case. the euphoria of victory fades
quickly. Both winners and losers find they need more, much like someone
who has developed a tolerance to a drug.
Two sports psychologists, Bruce Ogilvie and Thomas Tutku, after
studying some fifteen thousand athletes, could find no support for the
belief that sport builds character. "Indeed, there is evidence that athletic
competition limits growth in some areas," they concluded after recording
depression, extreme stress, and relatively shallow relationships in
competitors. Many players "with immense character strengths” avoid
competitive sports, they found. Other research has found that competition
leads people to look outside themselves for evidence of their self-worth.
Cooperativeness, on the other hand, has been linked to emotional maturity
and strong personal identity.
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of competition is the way it poisons
our personal relationships. In the workplace, you may be friendly with
your colleagues, but there is a guardedness, a part of the self held in
reserve because you may be rivals tomorrow. Competition disrupts
families, making the quest for approval a race and turning love into a kind
of trophy. On the playing field it is difficult to maintain positive feelings
about someone who is trying to make you lose. And in our schools
students are taught to regard each other not as potential collaborators, but
rather as opponents, rivals, obstacles to their own success. Small wonder
that the hostility inherent in competition often erupts into outright
aggression.
Ridding ourselves of the ill effects of rivalry is not an easy task. It is not
enough to get rid of “excessive competition”--cheating and Vince
Lombardi-style fanaticism--because the trouble lies at the very heart of
competition itself. Instead of perpetuating an arrangement that allows one
person to succeed only at the price of another’s failure, we must choose a
radically new vision for our society, one grounded in cooperative work
and play.
But first we must leave the myths about competition behind us. Then we
can work to change the institutions that define us as opponents and devise
healthier, more productive alternatives.
AlIie Kohn is an independent scholar and writer who lives in Cambridge, MA. This piece
is adapted from NO CONTEST: THE CASE AGAINST COMPETITION, which will be
published by Houghton Mifflin this month. (NOTE: Book was published in 1986)
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