by Alfie Kohn
The word conformity implies something more than acting like others, of course. To conform is to go along, to accept a situation as it is. Its opposite is not only individuality but the acts of questioning and rebelling. In this broader sense, too, competition seems to promote conformity. If winning is the goal, one naturally tries to avoid doing anything that could jeopardize it. It is true that skillful tennis-playing is all that matters on the tennis court; one can act like a petulant child and still win important tournaments. But in most arenas victory is at least partly subjective. Attitude toward authorities and general conduct do count in the kinds of competitions that take place in the office or the classroom. If I want to get the highest grades in class, I will not be likely to challenge the teacher’s version of whatever topic is being covered. After a while, I may even cease to think critically altogether. “In order not to fail most students are willing to believe anything and [not to care] whether what they are told is true or false,” writes Jules Henry.77 If people tend to “go along to get along,” there is even more incentive to go along when the goal is to be number one. In the office or factory where co-workers are rivals, beating out the next person for a promotion means pleasing the boss. Competition acts to extinguish the Promethean fire of rebellion.
The inclination to take risks is stifled by competition in other respects, too. Not only does the competitor try to play it safe within a given activity, but the matter of which activities she gets involved in will itself be affected by the need to win. It is common for people to try to “cut their losses” by abandoning activities and environments in which they are less likely to win. A student who is driven (structurally or intentionally) to have a superior grade-point average will avoid exploring subjects in which he may not succeed. A competitive sports enthusiast will stay with the games at which she is proficient. “Anything I couldn’t be the best at, I didn’t do,” one writer confesses, adding ironically, “Vocational guidance counselors call this ‘getting focused.’”78 Again, the tendency to specialize and, more specifically, to play to one’s strengths is not exclusively a function of competition. But competition exacerbates this tendency, with the result that the need to win (which is to say, the fear of losing) will result in narrowing our lives, failing to experience new challenges. Competition thus can have the effect of discouraging healthy risk-taking—precisely because, psychologically speaking, so much is at risk when we compete.
This phenomenon, too, shades into the matter of performance, since risk-taking is a prerequisite for many kinds of achievement. It is true that winning at some kinds of activities requires that competitors take risks. But the pressure to win generally has the opposite effect, and the quality of work suffers. When an artistic task is turned into a contest, children’s products reveal significantly less spontaneity.79 When television networks have to scramble frantically for ratings, they tend “not to innovate but to imitate, because innovation requires risk-taking, and risk-taking is antithetical to winning in the shortterm.”80 (It is not a coincidence that the three major American commercial networks, operating within a competitive framework, produce virtually interchangeable programming, whereas the BBC channels in England, which do not have to compete, offer a real choice.)
Besides its effects on performance, a sterile kind of safety is also a good deal less fun than risking, exploring, daring, challenging. But here the point to be stressed is that competition affects the personality. Turning life into a series of contests turns us into cautious, obedient people. We do not sparkle as individuals or embrace collective action when we are in a race. We are less likely to take advantage of a new opportunity when we know that it sorts participants into winners and losers. In fact, the more one appreciates the values that stand in opposition to conformity, the more skeptical one will be of competition.
6
Against Each Other
INTERPERSONAL CONSIDERATIONS
That trophy is the truth, the only truth. I told him to get mean, punish some people, put some fear into them, you have to hate to win, it takes hate to win. I didn’t tell him to break anybody’s ribs. . . . I told him there is no such thing as second place.
—The Coach in Jason Miller’s
That Championship Season
POISONING OUR RELATIONSHIPS
The bug that is going around the office doesn’t remain confined to the office for long. Someone brings it home, and the whole family comes down with it. The disease that starts in the workplace is carried into living rooms and bedrooms.
The disease is competition. In a society that trains us to regard our workmates as adversaries, we find no sanctuary in the private sphere. “Industrial man, consciously or unconsciously, often considers not only his business rivals as competitors but also his sex partners, siblings, neighbors, and peers of his group,” wrote Walter Weisskopf some thirty-five years ago.1 Never mind the office; the race to win is under way where you live.
The pursuit of a lover is a competitive game in which success is called “scoring.” Would-be suitors jockey for position to take the prize, and they regard each other with suspicion or outright animosity. A couple forms, and the two find their love frayed by the need of each to outdo the other: Who has the bigger paycheck, the most friends, the sharper wit? Who is giving more to the relationship, is more skillful or selfless in bed, has sacrificed more to be with the other? “It is quite sufficient for one partner to see life as a zero-sum game . . . and one may rest assured that things will go all to hell,” says Paul Watzlawick.”2 Let one lover be concerned with outdoing the other in some respect—any respect—and the relationship will be dragged down.
A child is born and with it two questions: Who will be the better parent and whom will the child prefer? “The ancient competition for the children between mother and father gains renewed vigor,” said Jules Henry, “and the competitiveness in our culture from which the family is supposed to give shelter enters through the back door.”3 Another child arrives and is subtly encouraged to compete with the sibling to be Mommy’s or Daddy’s favorite. Affection becomes a scarce commodity, something one must obtain at the expense of someone else.
The parents socialize with other parents and trot out their children’s accomplishments. Whose infant walked first, whose toddler came out with the most precious remark, whose teenager was admitted to the best college? The couples also compete to prove they have the best marriage, as Mary-Lou Weisman observes:
It seems we are so essentially a capitalistic society that we can’t even refrain from trying to sell one another our marriages, or at least we can’t resist advertising them. We are after all a highly competitive society. We compete at work, at school, in sports and on television game shows. All of these are but pale imitations of the competitions that are played on Saturday nights on a field of hors d’oeuvres.4
The measure of our domestic untranquility is the number of articles in the women’s magazines on the subject. Seventeen and Glamour and Mademoiselle tell of competitions with best friends and boyfriends; Redbook and McCall’s warn of familial struggles. The headlines read “Can You Bear It When Your Best Friend Gets Ahead?” and “The Marriage Superbowl” and “How to Cope with ‘Friendly’ Competition.” Even if we are not involved in the marketplace, these articles remind us, our personal lives are rife with rivalries. In an essay on the relationship between neurosis and American culture, Karen Horney summed up the situation:
The character of all our human relationships is molded by a more or less outspoken competition. It is effective in the family between siblings, at school, in social relations (keeping up with the Joneses), and in love life. . . . The genuine erotic wish is often overshadowed or replaced by the merely competitive goal of being the most popular, having the most dates, love letters, lovers, being seen with the most desirable man or woman. . . . Marriage partners, for example, may be living in an endless struggle for supremacy, with or without being aware of the nature or even of the existence of this combat.5
This
state of affairs, Horney notes elsewhere, is all the more tragic since the same competitive forces in our society that generate anxiety, making our relationships so important as a coping mechanism, also undermine these very relationships.6 In a competitive society, there is nowhere left to turn.
Competition acts not only to strain our existing relationships to the breaking point, but also to prevent them from developing in the first place. Camaraderie and companionship—to say nothing of genuine friendship and love—scarcely have a chance to take root when we are defined as competitors. In the workplace, one tries to remain on friendly terms with one’s colleagues, but there is guardedness, a part of the self held in reserve; even when no rivalry exists at the moment, one never knows whom one will have to compete against next week. I was recently told that extended training seminars for computer programmers are sometimes set up as contests: one’s ultimate status and salary are determined by how many programs one produces. The result, according to one reluctant participant, is that friendships are nipped in the bud because each person must try to outdo the others. Performing artists similarly find it hard to enjoy each other’s company since they may audition for the same part or position. Says one actress: “I keep a distance from everybody because I know one day”—she snaps her fingers—“it’s all going to be gone and you’re going to be working against each other.”
On the competitive playing field, the story is much the same. The occasional real friendship that develops is the exception that proves the rule. One article about professional tennis paraphrases an official as follows: “If it comes down to choosing between winning and maintaining a friendship . . . successful players sacrifice the friendship.” He adds: “There’s no place for sentiment. It’s a matter of survival.”7 The win/lose structure inevitably affects the priorities and temperaments of the individual players, according to sports psychologists Bruce Ogilvie and Thomas Tutko. A personality profile administered to fifteen thousand athletes revealed “low interest in receiving support and concern from others, low need to take care of others, and low need for affiliation. Such a personality,” the researchers conclude, “seems necessary to achieve victory over others.”8 Another study found that characteristics such as “kindness, sympathy, and unselfishness” are notably absent among successful athletes.9 Psychotherapist Lillian Rubin describes how such a personality likely takes shape:
To win for his team a boy beats his best friend . . . [so] winning means also losing something precious in the relationship with a friend. For it is not likely that the two will compete on the football field and have a close and loving relationship off it, not likely that they can put on a show of invincibility during the game and share their fears and vulnerabilities after it. Not very different, is it, from the world of work for which he is destined? . . . Not very good training, is it, for the kind of sharing of self and emotional support friendship requires?10
The assertion one sometimes hears to the effect that competition need not interfere with friendship assumes that our orientation toward someone can switch from supportive to rivalrous and back again as if we were changing television channels. It is simply unrealistic to think that the hostility engendered by and experienced during a contest will evaporate into thin air, leaving the relationship between the two individuals unaffected. I do not mean to say that no one has ever had a satisfying relationship with a competitor, but that competition inhibits such relationships, just as it corrodes the relationships we have already developed. This chapter is concerned with the reason this happens and the consequences it brings.
ANATOMY OF A RIVAL
Simply from knowing that competition damages self-esteem, we can predict that relationships will be in trouble. This seems to follow from Harry Stack Sullivan’s comment in the last chapter to the effect that it is difficult for me to feel good about others when I don’t feel good about myself. I feel my worth is in doubt—it is contingent on winning—so I am unable to extend myself to you. From her research with children, psychologist Carole Ames concluded that just such a connection between self-esteem and relationship exists: “The experience of failure in competitive settings that resulted in depressed beliefs in their own ability . . . is likely to affect negatively the child’s own feelings of competence and self-worth and potentially interfere with future relationships with others.”11
But the interpersonal consequences of competition do not depend solely on the psychology of the individual. Competition by its very nature damages relationship. Its nature, remember, is mutually exclusive goal attainment, which means that competitors’ interests are inherently opposed. I succeed if you fail, and vice versa, so my objective is to do everything possible to trip you up. This attitude does not reflect a neurotic or sadistic orientation on my part. It is the heart of competition itself because competition decrees that both of us cannot succeed. This effect is easiest to see where we compete face to face, but even where the contest is indirect, such as the diffuse pursuit of a consumer’s dollar in which market share is gained at the expense of anonymous competitors, I will regard others—and correctly so—as stumbling blocks on my path.
Under conditions of competition, “the failure of others has the same relative effect as one’s own success,”12 so the failure of others is devoutly to be wished. It is a small step from wanting someone else to fail at a particular task to wanting bad things in general for that person. I come to associate your disappointment with my pleasure, even when we are not in a zero-sum situation. It is another small step to adopting an adversarial posture all the time. One fails to distinguish between those others who are rivals and those who are not (at least for the moment). Put the two tendencies together and the pattern of behavior that emerges is one of treating virtually everyone as inimical to one’s own goals and wishing them ill. “In a competitive culture,” writes Henry, “anybody’s success at anything is one’s own defeat, even though one is completely uninvolved in the success.’”13
Earlier I referred to a study demonstrating that American children often choose to take away another child’s toy despite the fact that they have nothing to gain from this. The experiment, with seven- to nine-year-olds, found that 78 percent of the Anglo-American children (who presumably had become well accustomed to competition) “took the other child’s toy away for no other reason than to prevent the other child from having it.” Mexican children, whose socialization had been less competitive, did so only half as often.14
Indiscriminate rivalrous behavior can be explained according to simple principles of learning theory. Baby Albert, the hapless subject of John B. Watson’s classic 1920 experiment, was exposed to a loud noise every time he saw a white rat. He thereby learned to fear the rat—but also (though unexpectedly) to generalize this fear to everything furry. It is much the same for the rest of us: when we repeatedly encounter people under competitive conditions, we will spontaneously begin to regard all others as rivals and treat them accordingly.
Learning theory cannot capture the full import of this point, however. We need a model of human relationship—its potential richness and significance to our lives—against which to understand the effects of competition. The philosopher Martin Buber spent his life devising such a model. For him, the fulfillment of human life was relationship, the realm of the “interhuman.” Buber described the wondrous possibility of treating another person not as an “it” but as a “Thou,” not as a means but as an end, so that “each becomes aware of the other and is thus related to him in such a way that he does not regard and use him as his object, but as his partner in a living event.”15
This possibility depends on my coming to understand our common humanity, which is to say, coming to see that your needs and feelings are analogous to my own. Now clearly I know myself as a center of experience, the one who perceives and acts in and reflects on a world. All of existentialist thought is a kind of rebellion against the intellectual systems and real-world practices that crush or deny my subjectivity by reducing me to a part of a crowd
, a scientific datum, a pale approximation of some transcendent reality. What Buber adds to this assertion of my subjectivity is the necessity of affirming your subjectivity as well. You are not just a part of my world but the center of your own.
Some night while you are driving along a highway, try to imaginatively capture the reality of the other drivers. Each set of headlights represents a person who is, like you, on her way somewhere. In other situations, look deeply into someone’s eyes and try to grasp the fact that this is a person who is not just being watched but is a watcher—just like you. If you succeed at reclaiming the subjectivity of the other, you will be unable to hurt him or even to dismiss him. You can dismiss an abstraction (a jock, some bureaucrat, that schizophrenic); you can mistreat an object (a “piece of ass,” a terrorist). But as soon as you come upon a human being, you will be moved to share yourself with him, to care for him. It will be far more difficult to hurt his feelings or ignore him or simply analyze him. It will be almost impossible to kill him or cheer his death, which is why this sort of orientation can put armies out of business. Kafka once said that war is caused by a “monstrous lack of imagination”; it should be clear now that he meant the ability to imagine the subjectivity of others.
To say that you and I share a common humanity, however, is not to say that we are the same. On the contrary, I must encounter you as an other rather than as a mirror of myself or an object of my own experience. Empathy, in the sense of picturing myself in your situation, is not enough: The point is to see your situation from your perspective, which is not identical with mine. I must “imagine the real”—see the world as you do, experience your inner life. This, according to Buber, is “a bold swinging—demanding the most intensive stirring of one’s being—into the life of the other.”16 When I both regard you as a subject and recognize your otherness, there is the making of human relationship at its fullest. All of us can strive to receive others this way, and in so doing we prepare the ground for genuine dialogue, a reciprocal sharing by which both participants are enriched.