No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  The ideal of human relationship that Buber describes is, of course, only imperfectly realized. There are circumstances, both internal and external, that interfere with our coming to see another person as different from ourselves and as a subject. Our own needs can drown out the other’s cry. The frantic pace of modern life can divert us from the other’s humanity. But had we set out deliberately to sabotage relationship, we could hardly have done better than to arrange for people to have to compete against each other.

  At this point, let me recall the distinction between pursuing a goal independently and pursuing it competitively. Obviously the former is not conducive to relationship since interaction is ruled out. My success and your success are totally separate, so I don’t have to have anything to do with you. But competition entails a kind of perverse interdependence: our fates are linked in that I cannot succeed unless you fail. Thus I regard you merely as someone over whom to triumph. Because you are my rival, you are an “it” to me, an object, something I use for my own ends. This dynamic is found in virtually all exploitative relationships. All too commonly, for example, a busdriver is seen solely in terms of his function; he gets us from here to there. To the extent we perceive him this way—essentially as an appendage of the bus itself—we cannot enter into dialogue with him. But competition takes objectification a step further since I not only use you but try to defeat you. True, you regard me in the same way, and this creates a symmetry that is not present in, say, the boss’s relationship to his worker. But it is a fearful symmetry. For competitors, the objectification is doubled; the prospects for relationship are twice buried.

  The reductio ad absurdum of competition is war, and it is here that we find antagonists most thoroughly negating the humanity of others in order to be able to kill them. One fires on Krauts or gooks, not on people. But precisely the same process is in evidence in less deadly kinds of competition. Tennis players imagine “a faceless opponent,” says one sports psychologist. Adds another: “The more you get involved with playing a personality, the worse you do.”17 A pro football player writes:

  We were really fired up and felt we were going to annihilate “them.” I particularly didn’t want to see their faces, because the more anonymous they were the better it was for me—and I’m sure most of the other ball players felt the same way: they were a faceless enemy we had to meet.”18

  Depriving adversaries of personalities, of faces, of their subjectivity, is a strategy we automatically adopt in order to win. Some people do this more effectively than others, but the posture is demanded by the very structure of competition. We may try to reassure ourselves with talk about “friendly competition,” but the fact remains that seeing another person as a rival and seeing her as a “partner in a living event” are fundamentally incompatible stances. It is difficult to imagine a more telling indictment of an activity than the fact that it demands such depersonalization.

  There is some empirical confirmation of this phenomenon. A series of ten studies conducted by David and Roger Johnson investigated the effect of various learning environments on “perspective taking”—that is, on “the ability to understand how a situation appears to another person and how that person is reacting cognitively and emotionally to the situation.” The studies show that “cooperative learning experiences . . . promote greater cognitive and affective perspective taking than do competitive or individualistic learning experiences.”19 In one recent experiment, for example, undergraduates played at managing businesses and had to negotiate with one another. Those playing under competitive conditions were less able to take the other company’s perspective—which here was defined in terms of something as simple as understanding how many assets the other had.20

  What is true of a competitive situation may well be true of a competitive individual. Mark Barnett and his associates asked first-grade teachers to rate their students with respect to competitiveness. Then the experimenters administered a well-tested measure of empathy in which subjects were asked for their feelings after watching slides of same-aged children who seemed happy, sad, angry, or fearful. The result: “Children rated as highly competitive were found to have lower empathy scores than children rated as relatively less competitive.”21

  Of course the absence of basic empathy precludes anything like the sort of relationship of which Buber spoke, but it has another, more easily observed, effect, as well: it means that one is less likely to help others. We are especially inclined to assist people when we can imaginatively experience what they are going through.22 If empathy encourages altruism and competition depresses empathy, then we should find an inverse relationship between competition and altruism—and so we do. “There is considerable evidence to suggest that cooperative settings, when compared to competitive settings, promote more mutual liking, more sharing, and more helping behaviors,” writes Carole Ames.23 A 1968 study of nursery school boys found that those who were less generous in giving away candies also seemed more competitive while playing a racing game with dolls. Conversely, wrote the experimenters, “High generosity seems to be part of a pattern which involves less intense interpersonal competition.”24 Another pair of researchers confirmed this effect with fifth-grade boys several years later. After playing a bowling game and receiving some tokens, each child was permitted (in the experimenters’ absence) to contribute some of them to a March of Dimes canister. Those who were told they had won gave away more than those who were told they had lost or tied. But those who had played noncompetitively contributed the most of all.25 This finding is not very surprising, the experimenters note, since “charitable or helping behaviors . . . by definition are antithetical to competitive behaviors.”26

  The point here is not that competitive individuals never give money to charity. It is rather that competition ultimately discourages generosity. While we pay lip service to helping people in our culture, or write an occasional check to the United Way, our fundamental orientation toward others is trying to beat them. Because success seems to entail this, we subtly discourage our children from being too concerned about the welfare of others. “Parents generally want their children to be able to compete successfully—and how can they compete if they’re altruists?” asks Maya Pines rhetorically.27

  Now it may be possible to fall short of Buberian dialogue while still coexisting amicably. But competition’s effects run far deeper than simply closing off an ideal; it tends to turn our relationships into something distinctly unpleasant. Here again is Karen Horney: “Competitiveness . . . creates easily aroused envy towards the stronger ones, contempt for the weaker, distrust towards everyone . . . so the satisfaction and reassurance which one can get out of human relations are limited and the individual becomes more or less emotionally isolated.”28 Let us take these three consequences—envy, contempt, and distrust—in turn.

  To envy another person is to want what he has and to resent him for having it. As is usual for familiar (and disturbing) characteristics, we tend to assume that this is part of “human nature.” But desire is largely a social creation, and so is the distribution of what is valued. Competition creates a prized status where none existed before (see [>]), thereby giving us something to desire. Then it insures that not everyone can get it. Finally, competition requires that those who obtain the reward can do so only by defeating everyone else. Both the objective and subjective conditions for envy are established, in other words: restricted access to something desired and a (quite accurate) belief that someone else has got it at one’s own expense. Even if no social arrangement could do away with a taste for what others have, competition adds the sour flavor of resentment. It is the latter that spoils relationship. Indeed, Bertrand Russell once wrote, “There is, so far as I know, no way of dealing with envy except to make the lives of the envious happier and fuller, and to encourage in youth the idea of collective enterprises rather than competition.”29 Contempt for others is induced by competition in two ways. First, envy for what the winners have (and bitterness at their having it) easily c
ongeals into enmity. Jules Henry spoke of how we encourage this feeling in the classroom:

  Since all but the brightest children have the constant experience that others succeed at their expense, they cannot [help] but develop an inherent tendency to hate—to hate the success of others, to hate others who are successful, and to be determined to prevent it. Along with this, naturally, goes the hope that others will fail.30

  The second kind of contempt, the sort that Horney had in mind, is directed at the losers. It derives from the effort of winners—and here we may specifically point to the economically privileged—to justify their success by maintaining that winning is their natural reward for being winners. This is not a tautology. Certain people are believed to enjoy the status of being winners in advance of actually winning. These winners are good people, not only capable but virtuous, and their victories are therefore always deserved. The corollary to this is that those who lose deserve their fate, too, and merit only contempt.

  We usually do not spell out these assumptions, but they color our perception of winning and losing. They probably are the legacy of social Darwinism, which, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, “supplied [the competitive order] with a cosmic rationale. Competition was glorious. Just as survival was the result of strength, success was the reward of virtue.”31 George Orwell, reflecting on his school days, put it this way: “Virtue consisted in winning. . . . Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.”32

  Despite the outrageous arrogance of this view, winners are sometimes successful in persuading losers of its validity. This has two consequences: (1) The losers’ contempt for the winners is mixed with selfcontempt, and (2) the losers will set about not to change the system (a move that would in any case be dismissed as “sour grapes”) but only to become a winner next time. Thus there is no one to press for structural change. The contempt for losers, then, not only tears at the fabric of human relationship but functions as a powerfully conservative force.

  Finally, there is the matter of distrust. Love, of course, is based on trust, but so, to a lesser extent, is our ability to function in any social system. Even if we are mere acquaintances, you and I expect certain things from, and are vulnerable to, each other. But set up a system where we must compete against each other, and a breeding ground for distrust has been established. Indeed, why should you trust me if I have every reason to want you to fail? Distrust spreads rapidly, too—first, because I am never sure that you might not become my rival even if you are not at present; second, because (as discussed earlier) we generalize what we learn to new environments; and, third, because a vicious circle is generated, in which I respond in kind to your attitude. Disclosing my self to others can be considered a key element of psychological health33 and is, at any rate, an important part of relationship. But competition erodes the trust on which disclosure depends. Whatever I tell you about myself or do to help you will, in a zero-sum situation, be at my own expense. In a competitive culture, we come to look at each other through narrowed eyes.

  When we compete, then, we objectify others, lose our ability to empathize, become less inclined to help. A chasm opens up between us, leaving us distrustful, envious, and contemptuous. The father of family therapy, Nathan Ackerman, saw the sad legacy of competition in the home. “The strife of competition reduces empathic sympathy, distorts communication, impairs the mutuality of support and sharing, and decreases the satisfaction of personal need.”34 All of this may well result in isolation, as Horney contended, which suggests the provocative hypothesis that competition is not only the result of hyperindividualism but its cause. The chief result of competition, though, as Ackerman observed and as should by now be clear, is strife. Competition of any kind is a sort of battle, a hostile encounter. The following section will investigate this closely.

  AGGRESSION

  What is the relationship between competition and aggression? On one level, the question makes little sense since the two are not really distinct phenomena that can be related: competition is a kind of aggression. In the preceding section, I tried to explore what it means to try to beat someone. The arrangement is by its very nature a struggle or (depending on how one uses the word) an aggressive enterprise. Thus Horney was able to write: “Hostility is inherent in every intense competition, since the victory of one of the competitors implies the defeat of the other.”35

  If there is a connection to be drawn, then, it is only between trying to defeat someone and trying to do him harm beyond what is necessary for victory. The mediator between these two actions presumably would be feelings of hostility—which invariably attend competition at some level. Morton Deutsch writes as follows:

  In a competitive relationship, one is predisposed to cathect the other negatively, to have a suspicious, hostile, exploitative attitude toward the other, to be psychologically closed to the other, to be aggressive and defensive toward the other, to seek advantage and superiority for self and disadvantage and inferiority for the other, to see the other as opposed to oneself and basically different, and so on. One is also predisposed to expect the other to have the same orientation.36

  Indeed, hostility is practically indistinguishable from intentional competition, so an individual with this orientation will likely seek out competitive encounters. To this extent, the act of competition can be a consequence of hostility. But social scientists have been more concerned with the reverse proposition—the question of whether competition leads people to feel more hostile and, ultimately, to act more aggressive.

  Once upon a time, theorists speculated that participation in or controlled exposure to competitive sports or other aggressive behavior would drain off one’s reservoir of aggression. This came to be known as the “catharsis” theory, after Aristotle’s notion that one can be purged of unpleasant emotions by watching tragic dramas. Freud and the ethologist Konrad Lorenz were two of the chief proponents of this view, and it is not a coincidence that both believed aggression was innate rather than learned and spontaneous rather than reactive: we naturally need to vent our aggressions, and it is best to do so where it can do little harm, such as by playing sports. The substitutive satisfaction of competition thus was said to reduce aggression.

  There are few beliefs so widely held by the general public that have been so decisively refuted by the evidence. The catharsis theory by now has no leg to stand on, particularly with respect to the question of sports. Even Lorenz told an interviewer in 1974 that he had developed “strong doubts whether watching aggressive behavior even in the guise of sport has any cathartic effect at all.”37 And the well-known psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim conceded that “competitive or spectator sports . . . raise aggressive feelings of competition to the boiling point.”38

  Watching others be aggressive does not discharge our own aggressiveness. What seems to happen instead is straightforward modeling: We learn to be aggressive. Our restraints against aggression are lowered. Whatever explanation we devise for this effect, however, one study after another has failed to show any catharsis effect.

  • Athletes were found to become more aggressive over the course of a season, as measured by personality tests. Another study found the same thing for high school football players.39

  • Third graders who were frustrated by experimenters did not become any less aggressive when they engaged in aggressive play afterward. (On the other hand, those children who had the frustrating behavior explained to them became significantly less aggressive.)40

  • Elementary-school-aged boys were more likely to shove or hit their peers if they had watched a boxing film.41

  • A cross-cultural study revealed that “where we find warlike behavior we typically find combative sports and where war is relatively rare combative sports tend to be absent. This refutes the hypothesis that combative sports are alternatives to war as discharge channels of accumulated aggre
ssive tension.” If the catharsis theory were true, sports and war would be inversely related across cultures; in fact, they are directly related.42

  Those social scientists who have reviewed or conducted the research on catharsis speak with one voice. “Innumerable studies of aggression in children have illustrated that attempts to reduce aggression through the use of aggressive and vigorous play therapy have the opposite effect. . . . Sports participation may heighten aggressive tendencies,” says one.43 “Engaging in aggressive sports or observing aggressive sports . . . typically lead[s] to increased rather than decreased aggression,” says another.44 “Participation in competitive, aggressive sports . . . may more rightfully be viewed as a disinhibition training that ultimately promotes violent reactions,” says a third.45 And from yet another source: “The balance of evidence . . . is that sports involvement may heighten arousal, produce instances of aggressive behaviors and their reward, and provide a context in which the emulation of such behaviors is condoned.”46