No Contest: The Case Against Competition
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Consider the question of artistic creativity. The little research that has been done suggests that competition is just as unhelpful here as it is in promoting creative problem-solving. In one study, seven- to eleven-year-old girls were asked to make “silly” collages, some competing for prizes and some not. Seven artists then independently rated their works on each of 23 dimensions. The result: “Those children who competed for prizes made collages that were significantly less creative than those made by children in the control group.” Children in the competitive condition produced works thought to be less spontaneous, less complex, and less varied.40 In the long run, contests do not promote excellence among performing artists, either. Here is critic Will Crutchfield on the subject of piano competitions: “The emotional stamina to tough it out through round after round, as the competition winds on and the stakes rise, does not necessarily go along with the emotional sensitivity to make five minutes worth of truly remarkable Chopin.”41 In a win/lose framework, success comes to those whose temperaments are best suited for competition. This is not at all the same thing as artistic talent, and it may well pull in the opposite direction.
Across many fields, the assumption that competition promotes excellence has become increasingly doubtful. Consider journalism, a profession that, while no more competitive than many others, is worth exploring by virtue of its unusual visibility to outsiders. The frantic race for news generates terrific levels of anxiety (and the attendant psychological symptoms) on the part of journalists.42 Can we at least point to better reporting as a result of this competition? Setting reporters against one another in a battle for space on the front page or the first block of a television news show probably lowers the quality of journalism in the long run, and so, too, does the contest among news organizations for subscriptions or ratings. The latter is more likely to take the form of sensationalism, arresting graphics, or promotional games. A thorough study of science news reporting, which included interviews with 27 leading science reporters, led Jay Winsten to conclude as follows:
The most striking finding which emerged from the interviews is the dominant distorting influence of the “competitive force” in journalism.
. . . Science reporters, based at preeminent publications, stated that competition for prominent display of their stories creates a strong motivation to distort their coverage.43
Having to compete for space creates an incentive not for accurate reporting but for “hyping” a story—that is, exaggerating its significance. This tendency, Winsten adds, is complemented by the competition for publicity among scientists, hospitals, and universities; the combination practically assures that reporting will be distorted.44
In any sort of journalism, the ordinary pressures of having to work on deadline are exacerbated by the pressure to get a story on the air seconds before the competition or to get a fact that another newspaper does not have. The result is that the public gets less information over the long run than they would have access to if the various news organizations worked together. Moreover, news stories are more likely to be inaccurate and even irresponsible as a result of competition. When a jet was hijacked by Shiite Moslems in 1985, one observer blamed the “distorted and excessive coverage of terrorist incidents” on “the highly competitive nature of network television.”45 A second critic independently came to the same conclusion, noting that “too many decisions are made on the basis of beating the competition rather than deciding how to act responsibly.”46 The structure of competitive journalism creates a situation in which a professional or ethical inclination to forgo coverage—or at least to pause in order to consider the implications of running a story (or to double-check the facts)—is invariably overridden by the fear that one’s rival will get the scoop. Such competitive pressures ultimately benefit no one, least of all the public. Working against, rather than with, colleagues tends to be more destructive than productive. This corroborates the bulk of evidence on the topic—evidence that requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the usefulness of competition.
EXPLAINING COMPETITION’S FAILURE
How can we make sense of the failure of competition to produce superior performance? Most of the studies reviewed here offer at best a couple of sentences in the way of explanation for their findings. Other writers have addressed the problem, but no one has yet collected these conjectures and sorted them out. That will be the task of this section.
The simplest way to understand why competition generally does not promote excellence is to realize that trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Here sits a child in class, waving his arm wildly to attract the teacher’s attention, crying, “Oooh! Oooh! Pick me!” The child is finally recognized but then seems befuddled. “Um, what was the question again?” he finally asks. His mind is on beating his classmates, not on the subject matter. The fact that there is a difference between the two goes a long way toward explaining why competition may actually make us less successful. At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that excellence and victory are conceptually distinct. Now I want to add that the two are experienced as different. One can attend either to the task at hand or to the enterprise of triumphing over someone else—and the latter often is at the expense of the former.
It is true, of course, that the relative quality of performance is what determines who wins in a competition, but this does not mean that competition makes for better performance. This is partly because those who believe they will lose may see little point in trying hard. The same is true for those who feel sure of winning.47 But even where there is enough uncertainty involved to avoid these problems, the fact remains that attending to the quest for triumph, to victory as such, to who is ahead at the moment, actually distracts one from the pure focus on what one is doing. Helmreich proposes this as one explanation for his surprising discovery that competition is counterproductive in the real world: “Competitive individuals might . . . focus so heavily on outshining others and putting themselves forward that they lose track of the scientific issues and produce research that is more superficial and less sustained in direction.”48 And, more succinctly: “They may become so preoccupied with winning . . . that they become distracted from the task at hand.”49
Let us see how this distinction plays itself out in different fields. I have already noted, in the case of piano competitions, that artistic excellence is not promoted by making performing artists compete. This is true for the same reason that anyone who wants to run for president may, ipso facto, be a bad choice for the job: those who enjoy—and possess the skills necessary for—a competitive campaign may not be the kind of people we want running the country. (It is theoretically possible for one person to be both a good leader and a good campaigner, but these two talents are quite different and would coincide only by accident.) We find the same phenomenon even in sports, as philosopher John McMurty explains:
Actually, the pursuit of victory works to reduce the chance for excellence in the true performance of the sport. It tends to distract our attention from excellence of performance by rendering it subservient to emerging victorious. I suspect that our conventional mistake of presuming the opposite—presuming that the contest-for-prize framework and excellence of performance are somehow related as a unique cause and effect—may be the deepest-lying prejudice of civilized thought.50
Consider a different sort of example: the case of competitive debate. This is an activity as consuming and, in its own way, as brutal as football. High school and college students spend their days and evenings preparing for tournaments in which they will debate a major issue of public policy. These tournaments require them to argue in support of a resolution in one round and then against it in the next. The practical emphasis in debate is on tying logical knots, sounding persuasive, and even speaking so quickly that an opponent cannot respond to all of one’s arguments. The point is not to arrive at a fuller understanding of the question at hand or to form genuine convictions. Debaters develop considerable expertise as a r
esult of their preparations, but this is only a means to victory. As for convictions, a premium is placed on not having any; believing in something could interfere with one’s ability to win on both sides of the issue. This arrangement is usually defended on the grounds that it forces participants to see both points of view, but it does so in a way that promotes a kind of cynical relativism: no position is better than any other since any position can be successfully defended. When asked whether he personally supported a guaranteed annual income (which was that year’s national high school topic), one debater of my acquaintance could answer only that this depended on which side he was on at the moment. A recent newspaper feature story carried the apt headline: “Young Albany Debaters Resolve Who’s Best.”51 Regardless of the resolution under consideration, the exclusive focus of competitive debate is to determine who is the better debater.
Since the adversarial model on which our legal system is based works the same way, we might ask whether it truly serves the interests of justice or whether here, too, excellence and competition pull in different directions. Several legal scholars have begun to ask just this question, challenging one of the most sacrosanct institutions to have emerged from our commitment to competition. Here is Marvin E. Frankel:
Employed by interested parties, the process often achieves truth only as a convenience, a byproduct, or an accidental approximation. The business of the advocate, simply stated, is to win if possible without violating the law. . . . [He or she] is not primarily crusading after truth, but seeking to win . . . [and these two] are mutually incompatible for some considerable percentage of the attorneys trying cases at any given time.52
I. Nelson Rose, in a law review essay entitled “Litigator’s Fallacy," takes the argument a step further: “It is a simple step for an individual to move from the belief in [the adversarial] system of justice to the belief that he has justice on his side. A litigator has to convince himself of the rightness of his client’s case, how else can the gladiator go into battle?”53 This invites unethical behavior—using any means in the client’s behalf—and, in the long run, makes for an inefficient and unjust method of resolving disputes. One writer has ridiculed the underlying assumptions of the adversarial system, for example, “Mutual exaggeration is supposed to create a lack of exaggeration. Bitter partisanship in opposite directions is supposed to bring out the truth. Of course,” he continues, “no rational human being would apply such a theory to his own affairs.”54
Perhaps the tension between trying to do well and trying to win is most straightforward in the classroom. In his novel A Separate Peace, about competition between boarding school students, John Knowles contrasts two markedly different styles of learning:
I wasn’t really interested and excited by learning itself, the way Chet Douglass was. . . . But I began to see that Chet was weakened by the very genuineness of his interest in learning. He got carried away by things; for example, he was so fascinated by the tilting planes of solid geometry that he did almost as badly in trigonometry as I did myself. When we read Candide it opened up a new way of looking at the world to Chet, and he continued hungrily reading Voltaire, in French, while the class went on to other people. He was vulnerable there, because to me they were all pretty much alike—Voltaire and Moliere and the laws of motion and the Magna Carta and the Pathetic Fallacy and Tess of the D’Urbervilles—and I worked indiscriminately on all of them.55
Chet is “weakened” and “vulnerable” only from the perspective of a competitive individual, buttressed by a competitive system. While Chet, unconcerned with his grade point average, attends to what he is studying, the narrator is more concerned with strategy than with learning. His aim is to win, and this goal is necessarily achieved at the price of regarding the ideas he encounters as interchangeable. If this seems to describe many of the most “successful” products of our educational system, competition may have something to do with it.
Actually, it may well be that genuine education, which is decidedly not the consequence of our schooling, may not even be its chief purpose. The point of competition, suggests education critic George Leonard, is “not really to help students learn other subjects, but to teach competition itself.”56 David Campbell similarly observes that “the whole frantic, irrational scramble to beat others is essential for the kind of institution our schools are . . . [namely,] bargain-basement personnel screening agencies for business and government. . . . Winning and losing are what our schools are all about, not education.”57 Just as standardized testing chiefly prepares one to be a competent taker of standardized tests, so competition perpetuates itself—and often does so to the exclusion of the subject supposedly being taught.
Forcing children to compete is sometimes defended precisely on these grounds—that is, that early experience with competition will lead to more effective competition in later life. To some extent, this is true: one does learn strategies of competing by virtue of repeated exposure, just as one learns to regard other people as so many barriers to one’s own success.58 But the distinction between competition and the task at hand will be present in the future just as it is today, so competition will not be any more effective then than it is now. Moreover, many people’s early unsuccessful experiences with competition will cause them to try to avoid competitive situations for the rest of their lives.
The idea that trying to do well and trying to do better than others may work at cross-purposes can be understood in the context of an issue addressed by motivational theorists. We do best at the tasks we enjoy. An outside or extrinsic motivator (money, grades, the trappings of competitive success) simply cannot take the place of an activity we find rewarding in itself. “While extrinsic motivation may affect performance,” wrote Margaret Clifford, “performance is dependent upon learning, which in turn is primarily dependent upon intrinsic motivation.” More specifically, “a significant performance-increase on a highly complex task will be dependent upon intrinsic motivation.”59 In fact, even people who are judged to be high in achievement motivation do not perform well unless extrinsic motivation has been minimized, as several studies have shown.60
Competition works just as any other extrinsic motivator does. As Edward Deci, one of the leading students of this topic, has written, “The reward for extrinsically motivated behavior is something that is separate from and follows the behavior. With competitive activities, the reward is typically ‘winning’ (that is, beating the other person or the other team), so the reward is actually extrinsic to the activity itself.”61 This has been corroborated by subjective reports: people who are more competitive regard themselves as being extrinsically motivated.62 Like any other extrinsic motivator, competition cannot produce the kind of results that flow from enjoying the activity itself.
But this tells only half the story. As research by Deci and others has shown, the use of extrinsic motivators actually tends to undermine intrinsic motivation and thus adversely affect performance in the long run. The introduction of, say, monetary reward will edge out intrinsic satisfaction; once this reward is withdrawn, the activity may well cease even though no reward at all was necessary for its performance earlier. Money “may work to ‘buy off’ one’s intrinsic motivation for an activity. And this decreased motivation appears (from the results of the field experiment) to be more than just a temporary phenomenon.”63 Extrinsic motivators, in other words, are not only ineffective but corrosive. They eat away at the kind of motivation that does produce results.
This effect has been shown specifically with competition. In a 1981 study, eighty undergraduates worked on a spatial relations puzzle. Some of them were asked to try to solve it more quickly than the persons sitting next to them, while others did not have to compete. The subjects then sat alone (but clandestinely observed) for a few minutes in a room that contained a similar puzzle. The time they voluntarily spent working on it, together with a self-report on how interested they had been in solving the puzzle, constituted the measure of intrinsic interest. As predicted, the students
who had been competing were less intrinsically motivated than those who had originally worked on the puzzle in a noncompetitive environment. It was concluded that.
trying to beat another party is extrinsic in nature and tends to decrease people’s intrinsic motivation for the target activity. It appears that when people are instructed to compete at an activity, they begin to see that activity as an instrument for winning rather than an activity which is mastery-oriented and rewarding in its own right. Thus, competition seems to work like many other extrinsic rewards in that, under certain circumstances, it tends to be perceived as controlling and tends to decrease intrinsic motivation.64
Competing not only distracts you from a task at a given moment; it also makes you less interested in that task over the long run, and this results in poorer performance. In an article about female athletes, Jenifer Levin cited two studies showing that “when one does compete, intrinsic motivation tends to dramatically decrease, especially for women.”65
Again, this effect is especially salient in the classroom. The late John Holt put it well:
We destroy the . . . love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards—gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys—in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.66