No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  Other researchers have found much the same thing. When Elliot Aronson tried out a model of cooperative learning in elementary schools, he found that participating students “developed greater selfesteem than children in traditional classrooms.”23 Another sociologist, Ruth Rubinstein, used a written measure of self-esteem with children between the ages of ten and fourteen who attended either a competitive or noncompetitive summer camp. Self-esteem levels did not change significantly in the former camp, but they increased for both boys and girls in the latter.24 Morton Deutsch has found that selfesteem is “more negative under the competitive as compared with the cooperative grading system.”25 From his cross-cultural work with children, finally, Terry Orlick arrived at the conclusion that “experiences in human cooperation are the most essential ingredient for the development of psychological health.”26

  Whereas cooperation apparently contributes to high self-esteem, competition often seems to have the opposite effect. Why should this be? The first part of the question is easier to answer: Cooperation, which involves sharing skills, is, as we have already seen, a more productive arrangement. The greater success it yields helps each participant feel better about himself. Second, cooperation promotes greater interpersonal attraction, as we will see in the next chapter. People feel valuable and valued when their success is positively related to that of others (rather than negatively related, as in competition).

  That cooperation is healthy, then, should not be surprising. By the same token, competition’s effect on performance and interpersonal regard may tell us something about its unhappy psychological consequences. But we can go further than this. There are several very good reasons why trying to outperform other people fails to allay the very self-doubt that gave rise to this behavior.

  The simplest explanation is that most competitors lose most of the time. By definition not everyone can win, and, in practice, few do. In a one-on-one contest, the odds are 50-50; more commonly, competition is structured to produce a single champion and many more losers. If we feel impelled to prove ourselves by triumphing over others, we will feel humiliated when they triumph over us. To lose—particularly in a public event—can be psychologically detrimental even for the healthiest among us. At best, some exceptional individuals might emerge without damage to their self-esteem, but it is difficult to see how losing can enhance it. No one in a culture as competitive as ours is unfamiliar with the experience of being flooded with shame and selfdoubt upon losing some sort of contest. And when we add the phenomenon of anticipating loss to the occasions of actually losing, it becomes clear that the potential for humiliation, for being exposed as inadequate, is present in every competitive encounter.

  The more importance that is placed on winning—in the society, in the particular situation, or by the individual—the more destructive losing will be. “The greater the investment,” as Stuart Walker put it, “the greater will be the grief when we fail.” When “emphasis is placed not upon what is accomplished but upon what is publicly recognized, not upon the demonstration of competence but upon winning,” then the competitor eventually “comes to believe . . . that he is defective and deserves to fail.”27 Walker is describing the process of internalizing failure, of coming to equate losing with being a loser. It is a gradual process, but it is taking place at any given instant in our playing fields and classrooms, our offices, and even our homes.

  As we might expect, this terrible process takes place more rapidly and decisively with those whose self-esteem is precarious to begin with. Self-doubt will predispose such people to expect failure, to be crushed by it when it comes, and even, as we will see later, to help bring it about. But competition does not kick only those who are already down. Ames found that even “high self-concept children tended to be more self-critical following failure in competitive than noncompetitive encounters.”28 For these high self-concept children, losing meant not only becoming very critical of themselves but also coming away with “inflated perceptions of the others’ ability and deservingness.” Over time, Ames speculates, this could “begin to undermine their own positive self-appraisal and contribute to a learned helplessness belief. Further, the differences in self—other perceptions may have negative implications for future social encounters.”29

  Frank Ryan, a sports psychologist, argues that the adverse effects of losing are particularly severe among those who are better competitors. Thus,

  following a failure in competition the poor competitor is usually relaxed, in good spirits, and even talkative. In contrast, the good competitor who has had a bad day is difficult to live with. He becomes temporarily a bitter, morose, and sometimes unpleasant person.30

  Ryan, who is not a critic of competition, is concerned here only with what he takes to be temporary consequences. Bitterness and unpleasantness, he says, are indicators of a successful competitor, which is what we are strongly encouraged to become. Not low self-esteem but a winning record is what brings about these effects, he is contending.

  The larger point is that anyone, regardless of self-esteem, can be shaken by loss. And apart from the actual number of times someone loses, losing is always possible and often anticipated. It is an inherent part of competition, and thus there is reason to think that competition is always psychologically damaging to some degree. But even this does not tell the whole story. Psychological health implies unconditionality—the conviction that one is a good person regardless of what happens. In competition, by contrast, one’s self-esteem depends on the uncertain outcome of a contest, and this means that self-esteem is conditional. At best, one feels reassured and confirmed only sometimes. Since the idea is for self-esteem to exist without any strings attached, “sometimes” defeats the whole purpose.

  Despite this conditionality, though, doesn’t winning contribute to the high self-regard that is the undergirding of mental health? Can’t it offset the ill effects of losing for the victor? Victory, after all, is the goal—both the structural objective of the competitive encounter and the psychological rationale for participating. And winning is a tonic: no one who has been awarded a prestigious prize or clinched a title or defeated a long-standing rival can deny the thrill of triumph.* Despite this excitement, however, winning fails to satisfy us in any significant way and thus cannot begin to compensate for the pain of losing. This is true, first, for structural reasons. Winning offers no genuine comfort because there is no competitive activity for which victory is permanent. Whether we are talking about chairman of the board, Super Bowl champions, or the perversely prized status of Most Heavily Armed Nation, to become number one is immediately to become the target for one’s rivals. King of the Mountain is more than a child’s game; it is the prototype for all competition. Subjectively, the status of being envied and targeted by others may be superficially gratifying, but it is also deeply unsettling. Objectively, the reality is that it is only a matter of time until one becomes a loser again. Even after winning the Super Bowl, writes George Leonard, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry still wore his “mask of fear.”

  The problem is this [he continues]: even after you’ve just won the Super Bowl—especially after you’ve just won the Super Bowl—there’s always next year. If “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” then “the only thing” is nothing—emptiness, the nightmare of life without ultimate meaning.31

  In some arenas, the problem isn’t just having to win again next year but having to compete in a new population. The high school valedictorian finds her status counts for very little upon entering college; the contest (with the pressure) begins all over again. The writer competes against other writers for the opportunity to be published; then he must compete within his publishing house for attention and money so that his book will be adequately publicized and distributed; then he struggles for attention and sales, reviews and prizes. No sooner does the performing artist beat out others in an audition than she must begin the process again—perhaps at a higher level of prestige. Even a competition enthusiast like Harvey Ruben i
s forced to concede that “many strong competitors, upon reaching the summit of their aspirations . . . see their goals receding constantly the higher they climb on the social or economic scale. The discovery, ultimately, that ‘making it’ is often a hollow gain is one of the most traumatic events that the successful competitor can experience.”32

  The problem runs far deeper than these structural limitations, however. Apart from the objective absence of finality to competitive success, there is the psychological gulf between euphoria and fortification of self-esteem. One can get a powerful high from any number of substances and feel temporarily good about oneself and the world, but it would be difficult to argue that a snort of cocaine or a shot of whiskey can improve one’s psychological health in any meaningful way. Winning similarly feels good but fails to address the underlying dynamics that gave rise to competitiveness in the first place. First, the focus in competition is on proving one’s superiority to other people, and this, as we have seen, is not at all the same thing as establishing one’s competence. In terms of both motivation and the skills involved, winning and succeeding are two different things. To beat any number of others is not a satisfying indicator of actual skill or accomplishment.

  Second, and more important, even if one could demonstrate competence at a specific skill just by winning, this very specificity is limiting. One may be able to make oneself wealthier or more attractive than the next person, but no such particular quality gets to the heart of the matter. We want to be assured that we are fundamentally good, but goodness is difficult to pin down. The more desperate we are to believe in it, the more it seems to elude us. Thus we resort to reifying this goodness, externalizing it, literalizing it, trying to capture it in a specific quality. But being number one with respect to this quality can never satisfy the deeper, more global need for which it stands.

  The proof for this argument lies in the ephemerality of victory’s thrill. We may be giddy with delight for a time, but we soon come back to earth. In fact, those who compete on a regular basis report that both the intensity of the pleasure and its duration decline sharply over time—precisely as one develops a tolerance to a drug. After winning seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics, Mark Spitz reported, “I became sick of myself. I never knew how far down someone could drop, especially after being up so high.”33 Even without such a pronounced mood shift, any competitor knows that the effects of winning are not lasting, and this alone tells us of its irrelevance to psychological health. Self-esteem is not a passing thrill.

  But if we are not really reassured or satisfied even when we win, what do we do when the pleasure fades? We compete again. This answer is immediately obvious to us based on our experience but quite puzzling when we pause to consider the situation rationally. Instead of turning to other, more promising, means for meeting our needs, we return to the very approach that has failed us. Although boat racer Stuart Walker is, like Ruben, an enthusiast of competition, he accurately identifies this cycle:

  Winning doesn’t satisfy us—we need to do it again, and again. The taste of success seems merely to whet the appetite for more. When we lose, the compulsion to seek future success is overpowering; the need to get out on the course the following weekend is irresistible. We cannot quit when we are ahead, after we’ve won, and we certainly cannot quit when we’re behind, after we’ve lost. We are addicted.34

  The act of returning again and again to a strategy that fails does indeed suggest that something very like an addiction is at work here. One thinks of the compulsive gambler: he loses money and is driven to make it back in the next hand (or race or game); he wins money and, unsatisfied, tries to win still more.

  Instead of contributing to our self-esteem, then, beating other people contributes only to the need to continue trying to beat other people. The consequence of competition and the cause of competition are reciprocally related, just as the consequence and cause of drinking salt water. When we talk about competition, we are talking about a vicious circle: the more we compete, the more we need to compete. “Feelings of competition cover the deeper feelings of insecurity. The competitive feelings then produce a new set of feelings of failure, lack of confidence, and inadequacy.”35 Which, in turn, begets further competitiveness.

  This cannot be conveniently dismissed as the profile of a neurotic individual, as we shall see shortly; it is a description of how competition itself works. The strength of this cycle is not uniform for all people, however. We would expect that the intensity of the effect of competition would reflect the intensity of the original need to compete. This means that those whose self-esteem is lowest, whose psychological need is greatest, are those who will be most viciously hooked on competition. The effect is most powerful where the need is most pronounced. The other variable that affects the strength of the cycle is the importance placed on winning in the specific situation—and, in the long run, by the entire society. The more we reward being number one, the more we contribute to an addiction to competition. This is an addiction that takes hold despite competition’s failure to contribute to our self-esteem—or, rather, precisely because of this failure. And since, as we have seen, both winning and losing have undesirable effects, it seems clear that the problem lies with competition itself.

  DENYING THE DAMAGE

  At the end of the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian, scores of people who have been nailed to crosses begin bobbing their heads and singing a cheerful ditty called, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This irreverent sequence neatly satirizes a relentless, Candide-style optimism which should be quite familiar to us. One need not look very hard to find examples—often ludicrous, sometimes touching—of people trying to convince themselves that their suffering has a hidden purpose, that there is some underlying advantage to any terrible event that befalls them.

  That there may be no reason for pain, no ultimate purpose to human life, no redeeming justification for loss—these recognitions can be too much to bear. And while less dramatic, self-defeating personality attributes and unpleasant situations can evoke the same frantic process of justification. Thus Karen Homey points out that people who are morbidly dependent and self-effacing may believe these characteristics mean they are loving and humble; those who are detached and alienated from others may congratulate themselves on their freedom. We see the same thing in the case of people who are competitive—or whose lives are immersed in a competitive environment. Competing drags us down, devastates us psychologically, poisons our relationships, interferes with our performance. But acknowledging these things would be painful and might force us to make radical changes in our lives, so instead we create and accept rationalizations for competition; It’s part of “human nature.” It’s more productive. It builds character.

  The last of these beliefs is the most remarkable. Empirical claims about inevitability or performance are relatively distant from ourselves, and an argument about them can be carried on in a wholly intellectual fashion. But the contention that competition is psychologically beneficial contradicts the intuitive knowledge that I believe most of us possess. Despite direct awareness of what competition does to people (to say nothing of the kind of analysis offered here), some individuals persist in claiming that its effects are constructive. This is a powerful example of how it is possible to adjust our beliefs so as to escape the threatening realization that we have been subjecting ourselves to something terrible, that we have internalized a corrosive personality attribute.

  Also, this may be why “the traditional assumption that competitive sport builds character is still with us today in spite of overwhelming contrary evidence.”36 Apart from the absence of data to support it, the adage itself is exceedingly slippery. One sports sociologist reports that of all the writers he has encountered who repeat this assertion, not a single one actually defined the word character, let alone provided evidence for the claim. Character was “typically assumed to be understood as desirable and wholesome, or it was defined implicitly by association with such adjective
s as ‘clean-cut,’ ‘red-blooded,’ ‘upstanding,’ ‘desirable,’ and so forth.”37 For Douglas MacArthur, competition is a “vital character builder” in the sense that it “make[s] . . . sons into men.”38 This definition, besides being irrelevant to half the human race, tells us nothing about which features of being a man are considered desirable.

  In what may be the only explicit research of this claim, Ogilvie and Tutko could find “no empirical support for the tradition that sport builds character. Indeed, there is evidence that athletic competition limits growth in some areas.” Among the problematic results they discovered were depression, extreme stress, and relatively shallow relationships. Ogilvie and Tutko also found, as mentioned before, that many players “with immense character strengths” avoid competitive sports. Finally, they discovered that those who do participate are not improved by competition; whatever strengths they have were theirs to begin with.39