No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  The situation has reached the point that dozens of magazine articles and popular books are published every year decrying the excessive competitiveness of children’s athletic programs, such as Little League baseball. The spectacle of frantic, frothing parents humiliating their children in their quest for vicarious triumph is, of course, appalling, and the cheating and violence that result will be explored in a later chapter. For now, consider the simple fact that these experiences with competition are so unpleasant as to lead uncounted children to leave sports permanently.

  Is this mass exodus a bad thing? Unlike most critics, I am not at all sure that it is. In order to regret the fact that children are turned off to sports, you must assume that competition itself is unobjectionable if not delightful—and that potential athletes are alienated only because they receive too large a dose. I propose instead that while ill effects increase in direct proportion to the extent of competitiveness in an activity, it is competition itself that is to blame (although its effect will depend on an individual’s temperament and specific experiences). There is no threshold of competitiveness below which we could expect all children to enjoy sports. From this position, it follows that disaffection with sports should not occasion regret on our part—unless children generalize their reaction to all physical activity.

  My point in showing that the competitive dimension of sports is creating millions of future ex-jocks is not to argue that this is a tragedy but only to show that the link between competition and fun is largely spurious. Some people quit sports outright, while others may continue participating from force of habit, out of an unrelenting need to demonstrate their competence, or for any one of a number of other reasons that have little to do with genuine enjoyment. For all the emphasis on competitive recreation in our culture, then, its popularity is not what it first appears.

  But what of those who do enjoy such activities? A cross-cultural perspective is helpful here, reminding us that the members of some societies not only cooperate in their work but also enjoy noncompetitive pastimes. The unavoidable implication is that we are socialized to regard competition as an indispensable part of having a good time. We have been raised to associate recreation with the win/lose model that pervades our society, to assume that having fun means someone has to wind up a loser. We enjoy what we have been brought up to enjoy. A child in our culture knows without thinking how he is supposed to have fun with his friends: play a game whose structure requires that not everyone can be successful. When he does not play, he goes to watch other people play such games. This socialization is so thorough that alternatives to competitive recreation are almost inconceivable to many of us. “How can it be a game if no one wins?” we ask, with genuine puzzlement—the same puzzlement occasioned by talk of cooperative education.

  In resisting competitive recreation, most liberal-minded writers have implicitly or explicitly suggested that we should place less emphasis on winning. We can stop keeping score, for example, and try to shift our focus from winning to having fun. “Every young athlete should be judged only on his own or her own,” sports psychologists Thomas Tutko and William Bruns urge. “They should not be measured in terms of how they do as compared to others.”44 This amounts to suggesting that we be less intentionally competitive even within a structurally competitive environment. Like most reformist approaches to systemic problems, this recommendation is likely to be limited in its effectiveness. Where we are unable or unwilling to abandon competitive games, minimizing the importance of who wins and who loses does indeed make sense. But the usefulness of this approach depends on the kind of game involved.

  It is relatively easy to stop keeping score in golf, which consists of two or more people taking turns at independent pursuits and then comparing their success at the end. A more interdependent competitive activity, however, makes this far more difficult, if not impossible: “One simply cannot expect two tennis players to place their shots in such a position, provided they did possess the necessary skill, as to assist in the increased development of the opponent. This is simply not the reason for the sport as we know it today. The name of the game is win.”45 It is not merely that tennis is structured so that only one player can win in the end, but that in each instant of play success consists in hitting the ball so that one’s opponent is unable to return it. All team sports, as well as most competitive indoor games (e.g., chess, poker), are more like tennis than like golf. In such cases, well-meaning exhortations to be less competitive seem naive at best.

  To say we find competition enjoyable because we are socialized to do so is not merely to say that we teach our children to want to win, but that we offer them games where the whole point is to win. The only real alternative is noncompetitive games, and children, as we saw earlier, generally prefer these games once they are exposed to them—an extraordinarily suggestive finding.

  But how are such games played? All games involve achieving a goal despite the presence of an obstacle; in football, for example, the goal is to move a ball from one point to another, and the obstacle is the other team. In noncompetitive games, the obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than another person or persons. If coordinated effort is required to achieve the goal, then the game becomes not merely noncompetitive but positively cooperative. Such coordination invariably involves the presence of rules. While competitive activities are particularly dependent on rules—and inflexible rules, at that46—it is not the case that the only alternative to competition is the “Caucus-race” described in Alice in Wonderland, in which participants “began running when they liked, and left off when they liked.”47 While such an activity more closely approximates pure play, noncompetitive games are generally rule-governed. Thus, the presence of rules does not imply the presence of competition.48

  Partly because they do have rules, noncompetitive games can be at least as challenging as their competitive counterparts. They are also a good deal of fun, and, like the Caucus-race, can have the happy Result that “‘Everybody has won and all must have prizes.’”49 Consider musical chairs, an American classic for small children. In this game, a prototype of artificial scarcity, x players scramble for x—1 chairs when the music stops. Each round eliminates one player and one chair until finally one triumphant winner emerges. All of the other players have lost—and have been sitting on the sidelines for varying lengths of time, excluded from play. Terry Orlick proposes instead that when a chair is removed after each round, the players should try to find room on the chairs that remain—a task that becomes more difficult and more fun as the game progresses. The final result is a group of giggling children crowded onto a single chair.

  This is only one of hundreds of noncompetitive games that Orlick has invented or discovered, and they have been collected in The Cooperative Sports and Games Book (1978) and The Second Cooperative Sports and Games Book (1982). Another good collection is Jeffrey Sobel’s Everybody Wins: Non-competitive Games for Young Children (1983). As early as 1950, Theodore F. Lentz and Ruth Cornelius published their own manual of cooperative games. Among them are Cooperative Chinese Checkers, the object of which is not to move one’s marbles faster than the other player but to coordinate the two players’ movements so that they reach their respective home sections simultaneously. In Cooperative Bowling, similarly, the purpose is to “knock down the ten pins in as many rounds as there are players”—a very challenging task indeed.50 Other cooperative games require that each player make a specified contribution to the goal, that all the players attempt to reach a certain score (as in Cooperative Shuffleboard, which requires a modified court), or that all players work together against a time limit. Orlick also has defused the competitive element in more traditional games by manipulating the scoring procedures or constitution of teams. In “Bump and Scoot” volleyball, for example, a player who hits the ball over the net immediately moves to the other side. “The common objective [is] to make a complete change in teams with as few drops of the ball as possible.”51 A small family business in On
tario, Canada, called Family Pastimes manufactures about fifty indoor games for adults and children, including cooperative versions of chess, backgammon, go, Scrabble, and Monopoly. There may well be other such publications and products, but with a little ingenuity anyone can invent or reinvent many such games. Change the rules of Scrabble, for example, so that the two players try to obtain the highest possible combined score. Allow each to see the other’s letters. The game is at least as challenging with this adaptation, given that one must be thinking about saving certain spaces on the board for one’s partner and anticipating later developments from a joint perspective.

  Note the significance of an “opponent” becoming a “partner.” This is far more than a semantic transformation: the entire dynamic of the game shifts, and one’s attitude toward the other player(s) changes with it. Even the friendliest game of tennis cannot help but be affected by the game’s inherent structure, as described earlier. The two players are engaged in an activity that demands that each try to make the other fail. The good feeling that attends a cooperative game—the delight one is naturally led to take in another player’s success—may cast in sharper relief the posture one routinely adopts toward other players in competitive games—perhaps without even being aware of it. Cooperative recreation can, in other words, allow us to experience retrospectively just why competition is less enjoyable—and less innocuous—than we may have otherwise assumed.

  5

  Does Competition Build Character?

  PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

  A competitive culture endures by tearing people down.

  —Jules Henry,

  Culture Against Man

  Let us pretend for a moment that the popular mythology about competition’s being necessary for excellence is true—which is to say that all of the evidence reviewed in chapter 3 does not exist. Does this clinch the case for the desirability of competition? Not at all. The effect of competition on productivity tells us nothing about its effect on the competitors themselves. When we shift our attention from performance to people, we find more than enough reason to oppose competition.

  The question of psychological impact, while generally ignored by empirical studies, is a matter that touches us far more deeply than productivity. Even people who have never questioned the shibboleths about the usefulness of competition will confess that the ways it affects them and the people around them can be profoundly disquieting. Given a real choice, most of us will try to avoid unusually competitive organizations or activities. More significantly, we will steer clear of unusually competitive people. When we say that someone is “one of the most competitive people around,” we generally are not recommending that person as a friend. Such people, in fact, find themselves mistrusted if not simply avoided by others. When we become aware of our own competitiveness, we often become uncomfortable—a fact that is all the more remarkable in light of the professional rewards for acting this way. All told, the alleged benefits of competition do not keep most of us from reflecting on how “the rat race” of American life takes its psychological toll.

  This chapter will explore that toll carefully. It will argue that the closer we look, the more damaging we find competition to be. Its effects are sometimes insidious, sometimes practically invisible, but almost always unhealthy. Before considering the consequences of competition, however, it might be wise to look into its causes. The two questions, as we shall see, are more closely related than they might seem.

  WHY WE COMPETE

  The reasons for trying to be successful at the price of other people’s failure are numerous and multilayered. Sociologists and anthropologists explain this, as they do most things, in terms of cultural norms. These norms congeal into structural competition, and can become so entrenched that noncompetitive alternatives virtually disappear from the workplace, the schoolroom, and the playing field. This structural competition also shapes our attitudes and beliefs, thus encouraging intentional competition. Behavioral psychologists, meanwhile, are less concerned with norms than with the specific ways we are trained to be competitive. We are directly rewarded for displaying such behavior, and we also watch others being rewarded for it. As we saw in chapter 2, the combination makes for an effective learning program. In simple language, we act competitively because we are taught to do so, because everyone around us does so, because it never occurs to us not to do so, and because success in our culture seems to demand that we do so.

  It does not deny the usefulness of these explanations to supplement them with the perspective of depth psychology, which is concerned with the unconscious roots of our behavior. Psychoanalysts have contributed incalculably to the way we think about ourselves, but one of their central contributions—whose relevance to competition will shortly become clear—is the idea that we may unconsciously turn a wish or fear into its opposite. This can happen in several ways. Unacceptable feelings of hostility (toward people we are expected to love, for example) may be transposed into exaggerated concern. A dangerous attraction may present itself as extreme aversion, as in the classic case of the latent homosexual who incessantly ridicules gays. Finally, powerful anxieties may be dealt with by exposing oneself continuously to that which is dreaded; thus, the person who is deeply fearful of being alone may avoid other people and make a fetish of privacy in an unconscious attempt to overcome the fear.*

  Only when we understand these reversals can we grasp one of the most fascinating legacies of depth psychology: the insight that two apparently opposite kinds of behavior can be traced to the same underlying dynamic. If we are faced with someone who makes a fetish of privacy, we may come to see this as a manifestation of separation anxiety. But if we come across someone who hangs on to other people, even refusing to let go of destructive relationships, we may decide that this, too, can be understood in terms of separation anxiety. Very different—indeed, antithetical—personality patterns often converge once we peer beneath the surface.

  This phenomenon is nowhere clearer than in the case of selfesteem. Mr. A is usually seen as conceited; he talks constantly about his talents and accomplishments. Ms. B, on the other hand, is almost paralyzed by her enduring conviction that she will fail at anything she tries. Both individuals, as almost everyone in this post-Freudian age will suspect, may have low self-esteem.

  But now let us add Mr. C, most of whose waking hours are devoted to seducing women, and Ms. D, who acquires power over others by eliciting personal details about their lives while revealing nothing of herself. Then there is Mr. E, who schedules his day with inordinate precision and is upset by anything that does not go according to plan. Ms. F, by contrast, is always late for appointments, extremely forgetful, and unable to direct her own life. More than any other single formulation, lack of self-esteem can profitably be used to make sense of all these individuals. In fact, we could continue through the alphabet with other personality capsules without exhausting its explanatory utility.

  As a concept, self-esteem is extremely useful for those trying to understand why people act as they do. As a reality, the importance of high self-esteem simply cannot be overstated. It might be thought of as the sine qua non of the healthy personality. It suggests a respect for and faith in ourselves that is not easily shaken, an abiding and deep-seated acceptance of our own worth. Ideally, self-esteem is not only high but unconditional; it does not depend on approval from others, and it does not crumble even when we do things that we later regret. It is a core, a foundation upon which a life is constructed.*

  The absence of self-esteem, conversely, is at the root of a wide range of psychological disorders. Karen Homey, a theorist to whose work we will return, described all neurosis in terms of the absence of “basic confidence” in oneself.1 Another neo-Freudian, Harry Stack Sullivan, wrote that “customarily low self-esteem makes it difficult indeed . . . to maintain good feeling toward another person.”2 In his major work, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow similarly observed that “satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of se
lf-confidence, worth, strength, capability, and adequacy, of being useful and necessary. But thwarting these needs produces feelings of inferiority . . . [that] in turn give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic trends.”3 Indeed, as one social psychologist recently concluded, “few psychologists would disagree that positive self-esteem is essential to emotional well-being”4 or that negative self-esteem is integral to our understanding of many kinds of problems—from depression to narcissism, from severe character disorders to alienating patterns of dealing with other people. While we must always be on guard against reducing the complexity of human beings to a tidy theoretical framework, there is very little about our personalities that does not flow from how we feel about ourselves.

  I have argued that our behaviors sometimes turn our true motivations inside out, and I have emphasized the crucial role of self-esteem in the personality. When we put them together, these two ideas allow us to understand competitiveness more fully. Specifically, I would offer the proposition that we compete to overcome fundamental doubts about our capabilities and, finally, to compensate for low self-esteem.†

  Let us consider the two components of this formulation in turn. First, competing at a given activity reflects insecurity with a particular facet of ourselves. We try to be the best lover (or have the most lovers) because we fear we are not really lovable. We want to have a more impressive job than others because we suspect our skills are actually deficient. Second, these specific capacities stand for a global sense of inadequacy—that is, low self-esteem. Lovableness or professional skills in these examples can be said to recapitulate the whole self. To say that we become invested in certain qualities is to say that they are placeholders for our very selves.