by Alfie Kohn
76. Crutchfield, “Ills of Piano Competitions.”
77. Henry, p. 297.
78. Elin Schoen, “Competition: Can You Bear It When Your Friends Get Ahead?” p. a 10.
79. Amabile, p. 577.
80. Lear, “Bottom Linemanship.”
CHAPTER 6
1. Walter A. Weisskopf, “Industrial Institutions and Personality Structure,” p. 4. “The arguments of economic theory that competition is economically beneficial will not eliminate the fact that the individualistic, competitive, value-attitude system leads to aggressive interpersonal relations . . . [thus neglecting] the need for primary, warm, close, affectionate, personal interrelations,” he says (p. 3).
2. Paul Watzlawick, The Situation Is Hopeless, But Not Serious, p. 120.
3. Henry, p. 135.
4. Mary-Lou Weisman, “Jousting for ‘Best Marriage’ on a Field of Hors d’Oeuvres.”
5. Horney, “Culture and Neurosis,” p. 161.
6. See Horney, Neurotic Personality, p. 175.
7. Elizabeth Stark, “Women’s Tennis: Friends vs. Foes.” The official is Ted Tinling, director of international liaison for the Virginia Slims world tennis championship. Sports psychologist Frank Ryan also sees a sharp polarity: “The poor competitor prefers or may absolutely need an atmosphere of friendliness. . . . When the good competitor offers ‘help,’ it is probably a form of gamesmanship, but the poor competitor’s efforts seem to represent a genuine attempt to create a friendly atmosphere” (Sports and Psychology, p. 205).
8. Ogilvie and Tutko, pp. 61–62.
9. Walter Kroll and Kay H. Petersen, “Study of Values Test and Collegiate Football Teams,” p. 446. The study paired members of six teams from similar schools in order to contrast responses from members of undefeated teams with those of teams at the bottom of their conference. For some reason, the researchers had expected that winners would score higher than losers on the “social variable”; instead, their results suggest that doing well in athletic competition comes at the expense of positive relationships.
10. Lillian B. Rubin, Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives, pp. 81–82.
11. Ames, “Achievement,” p. 353.
12. Rollo May, p. 173. Jeffrey Sobel adds: “In a competitive game, a player reaches the objective—winning—only if the other player or players fail.. . and the winner can’t help but enjoy everyone else’s loss” (Everybody Wins, pp. 1–2).
13. Henry, p. 153.
14. Kagan and Madsen, “Four Instructional Sets,” p. 53.
15. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, p. 74.
16. Ibid., p. 81.
17. Sports psychologists Julie Anthony and James Loehr, respectively, are quoted in Stark, “Women’s Tennis.”
18. Meggyesy, p. 28. Sports can lead participants to regard “an opponent [as] a player, not a person,” write Bredemeier and Shields. “This objectification of opponents reduces an athlete’s sense of personal responsibility for competitors” (p. 29).
19. Johnson and Johnson, “Crisis,” pp. 136–37. Eight studies are cited here, and the authors conducted at least two more after this article was published. Some of the research contrasted cooperation with competition and some with independent learning, but a clear picture emerges from the research taken as a whole.
20. Dean Tjosvold et al., “Influence Strategy, Perspective-Taking, and Relationships Between High- and Low-Power Individuals in Cooperative and Competitive Contexts.”
21. Mark Barnett et al., “Relationship Between Competitiveness and Empathy in 6- and 7-Year-Olds,” p. 222.
22. On the relationship between empathy and altruism, see, among many other sources, Martin L. Hoffman, “Is Altruism Part of Human Nature?” (especially pp. 130–33), and Jim Fultz et al., “Social Evaluation and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis.”
23. Ames, “Competitive Versus Cooperative Reward Structures,” pp. 284–85.
24. Eldred Rutherford and Paul Mussen, “Generosity in Nursery School Boys.”
25. Mark Barnett and James Bryan, “Effects of Competition with Outcome Feedback on Children’s Helping Behavior.”
26. Ibid., p. 838.
27. Pines, p. 73.
28. Horney, “Culture and Neurosis,” p. 161.
29. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, p. 82.
30. Henry, p. 296.
31. Richard Hofstadter, p. 57.
32. George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” p. 36. Tutko and Bruns make the same point: “All too often, the message that comes through to those who lose or who fail to reach the top is that obviously they didn’t work hard enough and that they’re not as worthwhile as the winners. Our tendency is to excuse the shortcomings of a winner—to gloss over his human frailties. But when a person starts to lose, we begin to question his character. Winners and losers are actually seen as good and bad people” (p. 7).
33. The late psychologist Sidney Jourard was the most vigorous proponent of the view that self-disclosure both contributes to and reflects psychological health. See his Disclosing Man to Himself and The Transparent Self.
34. Nathan W. Ackerman, The Psychodynamics of Family Life, p. 114.
35. Horney, Neurotic Personality, p. 164. Family therapist Salvador Minuchin has argued that “Violence is inherent in the idea that one must be superior” (Family Kaleidoscope, p. 191).
36. Deutsch, Distributive Justice, p. 85. In 1964, Theodore Caplow offered a similar observation: “In virtually all competitive situations, some degree of hostility develops between the competitors as soon as they are aware of each other’s existence” (Principles of Organization, p. 318).
37. Richard I. Evans, “A Conversation with Konrad Lorenz,” p. 93.
38. Bettelheim, “Violence: A Neglected Mode of Behavior,” p. 194. Bettelheim continues: “It is peculiar to our culture that, in encouraging an extremely competitive spirit, we stress those aggressive emotions that power competition although aggression itself is tabooed” (ibid.).
39. These two studies are cited by Michael B. Quanty in “Aggression Catharsis: Experimental Investigations and Implications,” pp. 117–18.
40. Shahbaz Khan Mallick and Boyd R. McCandless, “A Study of Catharsis of Aggression.”
41. Study conducted by Larry Leith and Terry Orlick, reported in Orlick’s Winning Through Cooperation, p. 92.
42. Richard G. Sipes, “War, Sports and Aggression: An Empirical Test of Two Rival Theories,” p. 71. Several studies have since replicated Sipes’s finding. Sipes also investigated the relationship between military activity and the popularity of combative sports (football and hunting) within a single society (the United States) over time. He found that participation in these sports rose during wartime (ibid., pp. 78–79). Another cross-cultural study, while not concerned with sports, is also suggestive. If catharsis theory is true, wars should themselves offer an outlet for aggression. It follows that they should lower homicide rates. In fact, this massive study of 110 nations found that those with “the most fatal experiences in war were precisely those most likely to show homicide increases” (Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner, “Violent Acts and Violent Times: A Comparative Approach to Postwar Homicide Rates,” p. 956).
43. Cratty, p. 164.
44. Quanty, p. 119.
45. Dolf Zillmann et al., “The Enjoyment of Watching Sport Contests,” p. 299. Also see Leonard Berkowitz’s review of the literature: “Experimental Investigations of Hostility Catharsis.”
46. George Gaskell and Robert Pearton, “Aggression and Sport,” p. 276.
47. Novak, p. 213. To the argument that competition often humiliates participants, he has a ready reply: “Living with humiliation is part of not being equal to everyone” (p. 228). Novak also expresses regret that women are largely excluded from combative team sports and proposes that an activity “involving pushes and shoves” be set up for females (pp. 201–4).
48. George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit,” p. 153.
49. Wellington’s remark is o
ne of the most frequently cited aphorisms on the subject. MacArthur is quoted in Paul Hoch’s Rip Off the Big Game, p. 70, among other places. Eisenhower is quoted in Warner’s Competition, p. 171.
50. Muzafer Sherif et al., Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers’ Cave Experiment.
51. See my brief essay, “Soccer Riot: Competition Is the Villain.”
52. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, p. 92.
53. Joseph Wax, “Competition: Educational Incongruity,” p. 197.
54. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, pp. 224 ff.
55. Kelley and Stahelski, “Social Interaction Basis of Cooperators’ and Competitors’ Beliefs About Others,” p. 83.
56. The classic statement of the simple frustration/aggression hypothesis can be found in the 1939 book Frustration and Aggression, by John Dollard et al.
57. Janice D. Nelson et al., “Children’s Aggression Following Competition and Exposure to an Aggressive Model,” p. 1095.
58. Pauline R. Christy et al., “Effects of Competition-Induced Frustration on Two Classes of Modeled Behavior.”
59. Ibid., p. 105.
60. Johnson, Johnson, and Maruyama, p. 23.
61. Johnson and Johnson, “The Internal Dynamics of Cooperative Learning Groups,” pp. 112–13.
62. Brenda Bryant, “The Effects of the Interpersonal Context of Evaluation on Self- and Other-Enhancement Behavior,” pp. 890–91.
63. The Johnsons cite 32 studies to substantiate this, as of June 1984 (“Processes,” p. 10).
64. Gillian A. King and Richard M. Sorrentino, “Psychological Dimensions of Goal-Oriented Interpersonal Situations,” p. 159.
65. Pepitone et al., p. 209.
66. Deutsch, Resolution of Conflict, pp. 26, 353. The Johnsons cite eight other studies that confirm superior communication under cooperation ("Structure,” p. 229).
67. Tjosvold et al., p. 199. Also see Deutsch, Resolution of Conflict, p. 24.
68. Johnson, Johnson, and Maruyama, p. 7.
69. See the Johnsons’ review of research in ibid., as well as their own studies: “The ¡Effects of Cooperative and Individualized Instruction on Student Attitudes and Achievement” (1978) and “Cross-Ethnic Relationships: The Impact of Intergroup Cooperation and Intergroup Competition” (1984). When Elliot Aronson used his cooperative “jigsaw” classroom technique, he, too, found that children “grew to like each other better” and that this effect “crossed ethnic and racial boundaries” (p. 210).
70. “The positive cross-ethnic and cross-sex relationships built within cooperative learning groups do generalize to and are sustained in voluntary, self-initiated interaction in non-structured classroom, school, and home settings” (Douglas Warring et al., “Impact of Different Types of Cooperative Learning on Cross-Ethnic and Cross-Sex Relationships,” p. 58).
71. Robert E. Dunn and Morton Goldman, “Competition and Noncompetition in Relationship to Satisfaction and Feelings Toward Own-group and Nongroup Members,” pp. 310–11.
72. Johnson, Johnson, and Maruyama: “The comparison between cooperation with and without intergroup competition favors cooperation without intergroup competition by an effect size of .88 (indicating that the average liking among subjects in the cooperation without condition is equivalent to the liking at the 8 1st percentile in the cooperation with intergroup competition condition)” (p. 22).
73. Warring et al., p. 58.
74. Intragroup rivalry of this sort can also be explained in terms of the underlying framework of economic competition. It is here, too, that Paul Hoch looks to explain the aggressiveness of sports: “In a militarized society, gladiatorial combat brings in profits at the box office. . . . Professional athletes are encouraged to maim one another, not only by the macho-minded sportswriters and fans cheering them on from the side lines, but by the knowledge that if they’re not tough enough there are literally thousands of minor league and college players around to take their jobs. It’s the old reserve army of labor breathing down their necks” (pp. 27–28).
75. Carolyn W. Sherif, p. 34.
76. Parenti, p. 38.
77. Frank Trippett, “Local Chauvinism: Long May It Rave.”
78. Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit,” pp. 152, 154–55.
79. Gorney, The Human Agenda, p. 8.
80. Deutsch, Distributive Justice, pp. 255–56, 265.
81. Johnson, Johnson, and Scott, “Effects of Cooperative and Individualized Instruction on Student Attitudes and Achievement,” p. 212.
82. Roger Johnson et al., “The Effects of Controversy, Concurrence Seeking, and Individualistic Learning on Achievement and Attitude Change” (hereafter “Achievement”), pp. 203–4.
83. Johnson, Johnson, and Margaret Tiffany, “Structuring Academic Conflicts Between Majority and Minority Students: Hindrance or Help to Integration?” (hereafter “Structuring”), p. 69.
84. Roger Johnson et al., “Achievement,” p. 203.
85. Karl Smith, Johnson, and Johnson, “Can Conflict Be Constructive? Controversy Versus Concurrence Seeking in Learning Groups,” p. 660. Conflict in a cooperative setting “leads to higher quality decision making and problem solving” and “promotes higher mastery and retention of the material,” the authors conclude (ibid., pp. 652, 660).
86. Ibid., p. 661; Johnson, Johnson, and Tiffany, “Structuring,” p. 70.
CHAPTER 7
1. Philip M. Boffey, “Rise in Science Fraud Is Seen; Need to Win Cited as a Cause.”
2. Mark Green and John F. Berry, “Corporate Crime II,” p. 732.
3. Irving Goldaber, head of the Center for the Study of Crowd and Spectator Behavior, quoted in Jack C. Horn, “Fan Violence: Fighting the Injustice of It All,” p. 31.
4. William Beausay, sports psychologist, quoted in Gary Warner, Competition, p. 179.
5. Irving Simon, “A Humanistic Approach to Sports,” p. 25.
6. Tutko and Bruns, pp. xiii, 47.
7. Underwood, “A Game Plan for America,” p. 70.
8. Underwood, Spoiled Sport, p. 83.
9. William J. Bennett, “In Defense of Sports,” p. 69.
10. Hardin, Promethean Ethics, p. 38.
11. Michener, Sports in America, p. 427.
12. Combs, Myths in Education, p. 167.
13. A detailed and trenchant analysis of crime, which decisively refutes the assumption that incarceration solves the problem, can be found in Elliott Currie’s recent book, Confronting Crime.
14. Strick, pp. 57,97,117. Similarly, Jane Mansbridge observed: “It was not just paranoia that made former President Nixon compile an ‘enemies list’; it was the spirit of adversary democracy” (Beyond Adversary Democracy, p. 301).
15. Luschen, “Cheating in Sport,” p. 71.
16. Orwell, “Sporting Spirit,” p. 153.
17. Bredemeier and Shields, p. 85.
18. Johnson and Johnson, “Processes,” p. 87.
19. Novak, pp. 311–18.
20. Russell, Conquest of Happiness, pp. 53–54.
21. “Any individual who has been around football for any period of time knows that ‘elbows fly’ on the first play from scrimmage. This is when each man tells his opponent ‘who is boss.’ Yet let a player get ‘caught’ for punching and everyone exhibits great shock. . . . _Overtly we give the impression that the morality of sport is identical to the morality of the choir. It seems it is high time we either change the nature of sport (which is highly unlikely), or stop the hypocrisy and admit to ourselves the existing ethic. To condone, covertly, and punish, overtly, is not my idea of authenticity” (Slusher, p. 167).
22. This finding emerged from studies with three different populations, ranging in age from elementary school to college, and with two different tests of moral development. See Bredemeier and Shields, p. 29.
23. Sissela Bok, Lying, p. 258.
24. Tutko and Bruns, p. 84. Recall Stuart Walker’s equation of generosity during a competitive encounter with “surrendering” (see p. 124).
26. Frankel, “Search for Truth,” p. 1051.
CHAPTER 8
1. Ames, p. 353.
2. Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences, p. 249.
3. Andrew Ahlgren and David W. Johnson, “Sex Differences in Cooperative and Competitive Attitudes from the Second Through the Twelfth Grades.”
4. For example, a series of studies using the Work and Family Orientation Questionnaire developed by Robert Helmreich and Janet Spence has found that men score significantly higher than women on the competitiveness scale (see Spence and Helmreich, “Achievement-related,” P. 45).
5. Bruce Mays, “In Fighting Trim,” p. 28.
6. Robert W. Stock, “Daring to Greatness,” p. 142.
7. The reflections of Mark Fasteau are summarized by Jack W. Sattel in “Men, Inexpressiveness, and Power,” p. 122.
8. Matina Horner’s unpublished doctoral dissertation from 1968 is en-titled “Sex Differences in Achievement Motivation and Performance in Competitive and Noncompetitive Situations.” She later summarized her work in several places. See, for example, her chapter “The Measurement and Behavioral Implications of Fear of Success in Women.”
9. Miron Zuckerman and Ladd Wheeler, “To Dispel Fantasies About the Fantasy-based Measure of Fear of Success,” p. 943.
10. Zuckerman and Wheeler (1975) conclude that “Horner’s suggestion that success avoidance is more frequent among females than among males has not been supported” (ibid., p. 935). David Tresemer’s metaanalysis of more than 100 studies (1976) led to the same finding (“The Cumulative Record of Research on ‘Fear of Success’”). A recent Japanese study (1982) again turned up no significant sex difference (Hirotsugu Yamauchi, “Sex Differences in Motive to Avoid Success on Competitive or Cooperative Action”).