No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  This anxiety based on interpersonal tension (or the anticipation of it) is not confined to neurotics, then. What is more, it does not manifest itself only as a fear of winning. It is the dynamic of competition itself that elicits anxious feelings, and, to this extent, interpersonalbased insecurity should be understood as a third, independent reason that competition engenders anxiety—alongside fear of losing and fear of winning. The psychoanalyst Rollo May, in his pioneering interdisciplinary study of anxiety, came to the conclusion that competition is “the most pervasive occasion for anxiety” in our culture.60 Given the scope and rigor of May’s work, such an unqualified declaration is very powerful; it is not merely a careless generalization or a rhetorical flourish. His assessment should give pause to the most enthusiastic defenders of competition. The reason for competition’s generation of anxiety, May continues, lies not in the psychopathology of particular neurotic people but rather in the very nature of competitive individualism, which he takes to be one of the defining features of American society. This competitive philosophy “militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contempora[ry] anxiety.”61 When people are defined as rivals, it is difficult to build an overall sense of community or establish a genuine connection with a particular other. “Anxiety arises out of the interpersonal isolation and alienation from others that inheres in a pattern in which self-validation depends on triumphing over others.”62

  May then makes another point about this process: like so much else about competition, it works in a vicious circle. Not only does competing make us anxious by threatening our relations with others, but it sets up a scenario in which we try to solve this problem by returning to the very strategy that gave rise to it.

  The culturally accepted method of allaying anxiety is redoubling one’s efforts to achieve success . . . [so] the anxious individual increases his competitive striving. But the more competitive, aggressive striving, the more isolation, hostility, and anxiety. This vicious circle may be graphed as follows: competitive individual striving → intrasocial hostility → isolation → anxiety → increased competitive striving. Thus the methods most generally used to dispel anxiety in such a constellation actually increase anxiety in the long run.63

  In sum, the security that is so vital for healthy human development is precisely what competition inhibits. We are anxious about losing, conflicted about winning, and fearful about the effects of competition on our relationships with others—effects that can include hostility, resentment, and disapproval. Today there is no shortage of articles, books, and, most recently, workshops to help us with these insecurities. Any hesitations we might have about beating other people are seen as problems to be managed, not unlike overeating.

  This makes perfect sense. In a hypercompetitive society, resistance to competing naturally is defined as a weakness (albeit a treatable one). In a nation bent on waging war, soldiers who seem reluctant to kill people similarly are candidates for psychotherapy so they can be returned to normal. The analogy really is not farfetched because compassion, too, can be construed as a weakness if it is experienced in a competitive situation. Here, for example, is Stuart Walker’s reaction to the appearance of generosity during a competitive encounter: “Nowadays, whenever I hear myself say, ‘Well, let’s give him a break,’ I pull up short and ask myself, ‘Are you surrendering?’ . . . Whether deliberate or accidental all forms of surrender represent regression—relinquishing the joy of self-demonstration for the solace of protection and passivity.”64 Coaches and sports psychologists alike teach athletes to conquer their fears of losing, to overcome their apprehensions about winning, even to equate helping behavior with “surrender.” And after a while we do not need to be ridiculed and dismissed as a “quitter”: we internalize the message and savagely attack ourselves for our anxiety and our reservations.

  But is a reluctance to make other people lose (with the attendant guilt)—or, for that matter, an unwillingness to put victory before friendship—really something to be gotten over? I would contend it is more correctly viewed as an incipient sign of health. There is an important message in our recoiling from competition, just as there is in the coughing fit of a first-time cigarette smoker. Our task is to reflect on those anxieties, to weigh the values involved, instead of simply setting about the task of anesthetizing our sensibilities so that we can more efficiently triumph over others.

  ***

  The link between anxiety and performance has been documented. I have also said that anxiety or insecurity is undesirable in itself. But there are other manifestations of this psychological state—behaviors and physiological effects—that bear some mention. May, for example, notes that “the high incidence of ulcer has often been related to the excessively competitive life in modern Western culture.”65 The psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, an expert on suicide, names “competitive pressures” as a prominent contributor to the alarming rise in suicide rates among young people.66 Elsewhere, he suggests that drug abuse is another consequence of our culture’s “voracious competitiveness.”67 These informal—though informed—observations tend to substantiate our own intuitions, but the hard data are still missing. It is difficult to isolate either structural or intentional competition as a variable, since competitive situations and people often are defined by other features that might also contribute to stress. In any case, I am not aware of any researchers who have attempted to test these hypotheses. One provocative exception is an experiment involving monkeys. Scientists in North Carolina have shown that “aggressive monkeys eating a high-fat diet developed more atherosclerosis (clogging of coronary arteries) than did submissive monkeys, but only if the monkeys lived under stressful social situations that encouraged competition.”68 More research on competition clearly is required, including longitudinal studies that test for the effects of switching to a competitive environment. The seriousness of the consequences and the strong likelihood of their relationship to competition unquestionably justifies such research projects.

  FURTHER CONSEQUENCES OF COMPETITION

  PRODUCT ORIENTATION: Play, it was argued in the last chapter, is activity for its own sake. It reflects a “process orientation”—an inclination to do something because of its intrinsic value. Such behavior is rare among adults in our society. We are product oriented. Our work is governed by the demands of the “bottom line” and often is justified as an onerous necessity of life. The time we spend in school similarly is construed as valuable only insofar as it contributes to later employment, with the pleas for relevance in our universities having evolved into a demand for marketable skills. Even leisure activities have come to resemble work: results are what matter.

  When process has been supplanted by product in so many aspects of our lives, the same transformation must eventually occur with respect to the way we regard life itself. Who we are and what we are worth have come to be evaluated in terms of what we actually have produced or done, what tangible evidence of achievement can be adduced, what we have to show for ourselves. As soon as we illuminate this thinking, of course, its absurdity becomes clear. What is the point of all our frowning purposefulness? This shattering question—typically whispered in middle age when we can smell our mortality (and hastily dismissed as depression)—never gets a satisfactory answer. The pursuit of results is ultimately futile because there is no grand summation or coherent unity to our lives other than what we confer on them by the process of living. A bumper sticker that nicely satirizes the commodity fetishism which tends to accompany the product orientation reads: WHOEVER HAS THE MOST THINGS WHEN HE DIES, WINS. The economist John Maynard Keynes was similarly impatient with talk of “the long run.” “In the long run,” he is reported to have said, “we are all dead.”

  Competition is not the sole cause of the product orientation, but it is a mighty contributor to such thinking. The goal of competing is, by definition, to win. To enjoy aspects of the activity in its own right is beside the point. It can happen, but i
t is at best tangential. More typically, the process orientation is actively discouraged because it seems a distraction from the main purpose. The student who loves intellectual exploration will not want to rein in this impulse as the syllabus demands, and she will not have the highest grade-point average. The attorney who delights in the nuances of the law probably will not win as many cases as the one who cares only about the verdict and thinks in strategic terms. Competition is necessarily product oriented. And as more of our activities are directed toward winning, the process orientation becomes attenuated in our lives. Our eyes remain fixed on the scoreboard.

  According to two social scientists, whose essays on sports were coincidentally published in the same year, this product orientation is associated with rigidity. “In competition,” wrote William Sadler, “one’s perspective is fixed on attaining a definite result. If this competitive posture were sustained, one’s personality system would tend to become rigid.”69 The intrinsic rigidity of the goal orientation, not surprisingly, makes the individual rigid, as well. We might propose that the more competitive an individual is, the less spontaneous he is, the less receptive to surprise, the less flexible his cognitive process. Here is psychologist Dorcas Butt: “The character of the competitive athlete becomes increasingly undesirable as he develops an intense egocentrie orientation with rigid psychological defenses and insensitivity. His obsession with his own winning status dominates his being.”70 Not all competitors are equally obsessed, of course, but competition itself predisposes us—and not only athletes—to become invested in results to the exclusion of the process of working or playing or learning.

  EITHER/OR THINKING: It is common to view a situation as if only two alternatives existed—the “black-and-white fallacy.” America is either to be loved or left. I am either the most gifted and attractive person who ever lived or I am utterly worthless. Now we can respond to this thinking by pointing out that there are other alternatives (or a gray area in the middle, as the case may be)—treating it, in effect, as a lapse in logic. Or we can deal with such an all-or-nothing attitude psychodynamically, tracing the unconscious roots of perfectionism to the first years of life. But neither of these responses is quite sufficient. Dichotomous thinking is more than an error in logic. It is a real-life orientation, closely connected to how we deal with other people. And there is more going on than individual psychopathology: the social structures that shape our interactions also affect our assumptions about the alternatives that are open to us.

  Specifically, dichotomous thinking is both conducive to and a consequence of competing. In a contest, there are only two possible results: you win or you lose. Those inclined to see the world in an either/or fashion will be attracted to competition, but, by the same token, competition will help to shape such an orientation. A recent study of more than three thousand women in careers found that “the vast majority . . . came to believe that there were only two possible outcomes to their actions. Either they would somehow manage to force themselves to run at top speed all day, every day, or they would lose so badly that they might as well not have entered the race to begin with. . . . There was nothing in between.”71 To slap a psychiatric label on these thousands (actually, millions) of people misses the point. More useful would be an investigation of how a competitive culture teaches us that the world is divided into winners and losers, and how we generalize this lesson and come to see everything in either/or terms.

  The dichotomous worldview is a loaded one. When there are only two choices, typically one is seen as good and the other as bad. Everything we encounter can be neatly sorted out as rational or irrational, righteous or satanic, progressive or reactionary, reasonable or radical. A world that can be reduced to such simple antinomies is a much more manageable, comfortable world, one that does not ask us to grapple with tough moral questions. The price to be paid for this comfort is steep, however. To begin with, it is a distorted view of reality—akin to squashing the three-dimensional world into a twodimensional flatland. Second, when dichotomous thinking is competitively generated, there is a tendency to be concerned almost compulsively about what is the best. People, including ourselves, are either number one or they are unworthy. This is not a terribly productive way of thinking about restaurant meals or computers, much less about human beings.

  Finally, when we perform this kind of value-laden division, we normally place ourselves on the good side, and we want the good to triumph over the bad. A gulf opens up between “us” and “them,” and this very division invites aggression—a topic to which I will return in the next chapter. This is what Anne Strick described in the context of our adversarial legal system: From seeing Right and Wrong as the only two possibilities,

  we claim righteousness for ourselves and require an “other,” an opposite (religious, political, racial, national, sexual, name-it), a nonself who embodies evil. To that degree does blame become a basic behavior and revenge a solution. Such polarity not only implies superior-inferior; as it denies complementarity, it also invites battle. For superior tends to become pitted against inferior.72

  The steps are short: from “either/or” to “good/bad” to “we/they” to “we against them.” Structural competition is a significant contributor to this ominous progression.

  CONFORMITY: Because the United States is both an exceedingly competitive and a highly individualistic society, and because competition here usually takes place at the individual (rather than the group) level, we often assume that competition promotes individualism. But the word individualism actually is associated with two very different philosophical movements. On the one hand, there is the individualism championed by such nineteenth-century Americans as Emerson and Thoreau and found in certain strands of twentieth-century existentialism: it has to do with genuine self-sufficiency, conscience, autonomy, and nonconformity. The concern here is with the freedom to think and act on one’s own, the commitment to deeply held values, the courage to risk disapproval and worse from others.

  On the other hand, there is the vulgar parody of this movement that one finds in contemporary pop psychology and parts of the human potential movement. This is the desperate attempt at selfreliance that bespeaks alienation from others—while, in turn, contributing to just this predicament. It is the blithe dismissal of relationship in “you do your thing and I’ll do mine,” the pathetic attempt to compensate for loneliness in “be your own best friend,” the undisguised selfishness in “look out for number one.” (It is not at all surprising, by the way, to find this egocentricity walking hand in hand with a uniquely American proclivity for instant intimacy. The lat ter is just a superficial chumminess that vainly attempts to compensate for the effects of an ugly individualism.) As political scientist Michael Parenti put it, our

  “individualism” is not to be mistaken for freedom to choose moral, political and cultural alternatives of one’s own making. Each person is expected to operate “individually” but in more or less similar ways and similar directions. . . . “Individualism” in the United States refers to privatization and the absence of communal forms of production, consumption and recreation.73

  It is with this latter kind of individualism that competition is compatible. A narrowly conceived self-interest is conducive to beating out others. It is a short step from looking out for number one to trying to become Number One. This version of individualism implies an alienation from others, and here, too, it is commensurate with competition. But competition does not promote the more substantial and authentic kind of individualism. On the contrary, it encourages rank conformity. Here is George Leonard: “A culture dedicated to creating standardized, specialized, predictable human components could find no better way of grinding them out than by making every possible aspect of life a matter of competition. ‘Winning out’ in this respect does not make rugged individualists. It shapes conformist robots.”74

  This is quite logical since one can speak of outdoing others only if one is doing the same thing they are. Apples are not better than or
anges; one can make relative judgments only about like quantities. As Arthur Combs put it, “Competition can only work if people agree to seek the same goals and follow the same rules. Accordingly, as competitors strive to beat each other’s records, they tend to become more alike. If total conformity is what we want in our society, worshiping competition is one effective way to get it.”75 Notice that this is not simply an empirical observation (“people tend to act alike when they compete”) but an analysis of the nature of competition. Unique characteristics by definition cannot be ranked, and participation in the process of ranking demands essential conformity.

  This is not to say that competition is the sole cause of conformity in American society. There are many other social, economic, and psychological forces at work that cannot be explored in this book. But competition at the very least tends to support and reinforce this process of standardization.

  In chapter 3, I noted that competition dampens creativity. This is partly because the pressure to outdo someone else tends to make us conservative. We do not want to risk anything that could endanger our victory. Thus the music critic Will Crutchfield finds that piano competitions result in interpretations that are “all too similar to one another.” In trying to win, performers concentrate on making no mistakes but “shy away . . . from the big technical risks, the truly astonishing effects.”76 Creativity is anticonformist at its core; it is nothing if not a process of idiosyncratic thinking and risk-taking. Competition inhibits this process.