No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  If these data seem surprising, it may be because we have confounded interpersonal attraction with group unity. The latter is associated with loyalty to the group as such, and often with uniformity among its members. Thus, the citizens of a nation will indeed wave their flags more vigorously when they have been persuaded that another nation poses a threat. This phenomenon is not at all what I have been discussing. Allegiance to a country or school or corporation does not necessarily promote sensitivity, trust, better perspective-taking, and so on among those in the group. Conversely, liking the individuals in my group does not mean I will reify and then glorify the group itself. Intergroup competition may be necessary for chauvinism, but not for relationship.

  There is another reason that intergroup competition does not promote cooperation. Just as competition spreads from the workplace to the home, so it leaks from intergroup to intragroup level. This is partly the result of generalization of learning: it is not so easy to view some people as competitors, with all the attendant hostility, and then wipe away this orientation with respect to other people (those on the same team). The proof is in the furious competition for starting positions or higher salaries among athletes on the same team.74

  This pervasive phenomenon does not mean that competition is an irrepressible part of human nature. It means that the most effective way to set up cooperation does not involve tacking on competition at another level. Far better is cooperation at both the intergroup and intragroup levels. When hostility mounted during the Robbers’ Cave experiment, Sherif at first tried to unite the two teams by having them combine forces to beat a team from another camp. It didn’t work.

  The short-term effects of this common enemy were to induce cooperation for “our camp” to beat theirs. However, when the common enemy was gone, the two rivals quickly retreated to their own in-groups, still unwilling to cooperate in other activities across group lines. Further, had we continued the “common enemy” approach, we would have ended by merely enlarging the scope of the generalized effects of win-lose competition that had already occurred within our camp. In effect, we would have had a bigger war.75

  Sherif finally did end the vicious rivalry between Rattlers and Eagles by setting up “superordinate goals” for the boys to meet. These were tasks, such as pulling a truck up a hill or fixing the water supply system, in which the two groups had to cooperate—but without competing against anyone else.

  Up until now, I have been arguing that intergroup competition is not necessary for cooperation; now I want to add that this arrangement is also positively undesirable. Consider the case of celebrating one’s hometown. There is nothing offensive about the slogan “I Love New York” (except, perhaps, its dilution of the word “love”). This straightforward affirmation, however, is unusual today. Far more common is the defiant assertion that one’s city is “Number One.” As Michael Parenti has observed, “The lack of [a sense of] community does not prevent Americans from identifying with larger collective entities such as a school, a town or the nation. But even this identification is expressed in terms that are competitive with other schools, towns or nations.”76 And Frank Trippett, in a Time magazine essay that chucklingly approves of such competition, acknowledges that “local chauvinism habitually thrives on the disparagement of rival places or areas.”77 In a competitive culture, it is not sufficient to say that one is glad to live where one does; one must derogate all other towns and shout oneself hoarse about one’s own town’s being the best. Our usual reaction is, with Trippett, to dismiss such rivalry as harmless fun. This is also the prevailing view of sports and, for that matter, of any other competition that stops short of killing. But the sort of affirmation that is concerned with besting others, the sort of camaraderie that develops from working to beat another group—or from simply proclaiming the superiority of one’s own—has an ugliness about it that I believe is intrinsically objectionable. Camaraderie is desirable, all things being equal. But all things are not equal when the feeling is derived from derogating an out-group. As to the defense that it is all in fun, I am reminded of the person who cruelly taunts someone and then remonstrates, “But I was only kidding!”

  Beyond such principled objections are the practical problems. Sherif’s fear of starting a “bigger war” is worth taking very seriously. The We vs. They structure and the attitude that accompanies it are, after all, at the heart of every war. It is one thing to feel hostile in a contest that pits one individual against another. It is something else again to stoke the aggressive fires that rage in group rivalries. One need not believe aggression is inevitable in human life to point out how horrible are the results of multiplying hatred by the number of people in a group. More: the whole of competitive fury, like that of cooperative creativity, is greater than the sum of its parts.

  It is not readily apparent how we can end the awful legacy of nationalism—the tensions among countries that now threaten our very existence. But it is quite certain the answer does not lie in more rivalry—even the kind that is supposed to be “good-natured.” Afterdinner speakers urge us to rechannel our military competition into an effort to be number one in scientific or cultural endeavors. However uncontroversial this may sound at first hearing, it actually makes no more sense than the catharsis theory from which it borrows. Never mind that international scientific competition is likely to be far less productive than cooperation: the point here is that competition of any kind establishes an antagonism that contributes to, rather than deflects, feelings of hostility. The same is true for the Olympics, as George Orwell saw nearly forty years ago:

  Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples . . . that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles. . . . The whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism—that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige. . . . I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team . . . to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face.”78

  Inter group competition is too high a price to pay for intragroup cooperation, and it is fortunate that it does not have to be paid. Intergroup competition also is not the way to bring harmony and good fellowship to a brittle planet. Far more sensible is the premise that we should expand cooperation so as to include as many people as possible rather than restricting it to one’s in-group. There are enough problems—enough superordinate goals—to occupy us indefinitely, and our work on them will have the felicitous consequence of binding us together if we join in solving them. Even if no individual can actively cooperate with everyone, he surely can approach others prepared to cooperate. Students can learn together in groups and then share their insights with other groups. Cities can work together on common problems rather than yelling about which is the best place to live or abasing themselves in a competition for corporate favors. Finally, we can heed Roderic Gorney’s declaration that “Our ultimate safety depends only upon enlarging the circles of helpful cooperation one last step to encompass our largest units, the nations.”79

  CONSTRUCTIVE CONFLICT

  To cooperate, as I have tried to show in earlier chapters, is not to sacrifice either an achievement orientation or a strong sense of self. On the contrary, success will more likely be the result of working with other people, and the same might be said for healthy self-esteem. Here I would like to rescue cooperation from yet another misconception: it does not imply some idyllic state of harmony among participants. To the question “But how do you expect people to agree on everything?” we answer, “They won’t—and that’s why a cooperative framework for dealing with disagreement is so critical.”

  Conflict, per se, is not harmful. In fact, its absence suggests people who ar
e frightened (to challenge a superior), resentful, or bereft of their rational faculties (as the total agreement among cult members demonstrates). Children know that disagreement exists; to force them to agree in a classroom is to ask them to deny reality and it is to deprive them of a real education. It is no coincidence that the word challenge means both to require someone to use her full range of abilities and to call something into question. Genuine learning does not smooth over or soothe. The same is true of effective problem solving: a rigid demand for agreement means that people will effectively be prevented from contributing their wisdom to a group effort.

  What makes disagreement destructive is not the fact of conflict itself but the addition of competition. In a debate (as opposed to a discussion or dialogue), the point is to win rather than to reach the best solution or arrive at a compromise with which everyone is satisfied. Listen in at a board meeting or a dinner party and you can hear the difference between someone’s participating in an exchange of ideas and someone’s trying to score points. Both are examples of conflict, but only one involves competition. Morton Deutsch spelled out the distinction:

  A cooperative process leads to the defining of conflicting interests as a mutual problem to be solved by collaborative effort. It facilitates the recognition of the legitimacy of each other’s interests and of the necessity of searching for a solution that is responsive to the needs of all. It tends to limit rather than expand the scope of conflicting interests. In contrast, a competitive process stimulates the view that the solution of conflict can only be one that is imposed by one side on the other . . . through superior force, deceptions, or cleverness. . . . The enhancement of one’s own power and the minimization of the legitimacy of the other side’s interests in the situation become objectives.80

  When Deutsch refers to the use of “superior force” to resolve competitive conflict, he is not talking only about firepower. Tyranny of the majority usually takes place through voting. Trying to round up votes for one’s position or candidate has more in common with coercion by force than it does with working cooperatively to achieve consensus. One of the reasons that conflict nested in competition can be ended only by some appeal to power is that competition interferes with communication. The difference between cooperation and competition is the difference between listening to each other’s points of view and twisting each other’s arms.

  Cooperative conflict represents what Roger and David Johnson have called “friendly excursions into disequilibrium,” and their classroom studies have made three things clear :

  1. Students like it. In one study, arguing was less upsetting to fifth-and sixth-graders who participated in cooperative conflict than to those who had not.81 In another, students were more enthused about cooperative conflict than about either independent learning or a “concurrence-seeking” model in which discussion was inhibited so as to minimize disagreement.82 There was considerable dislike for debate in a third study, while not a single objection was raised against cooperative conflict.83

  2. Students learn from it. Achievement tests revealed better comprehension under cooperative conflict than under concurrence seeking or independent learning.84 A second study confirmed that this was true for high-, middle-, and low-ability subjects.85

  3. It promotes interpersonal attraction. There were “greater feelings of peer academic support and personal acceptance” and “greater accuracy of perspective taking” in cooperative conflict than in concurrence seeking, debate, or independent learning situations.86

  This last finding may be the most compelling. We feel better about each other when we air our differences than when we pretend everyone agrees. But such an airing must take place in the context of working with, rather than against, each other. Structural cooperation is not at all inimical to conflict. It simply allows conflict to work most productively by keeping out the poisonous hostilities of a win/lose arrangement.

  7

  The Logic of Playing Dirty

  For nothing can seem foul to those that win.

  —Shakespeare,

  Henry IV, Part I, Act V, Scene 1

  Even the most strident defender of the competitive spirit is willing to grant that one can go too far. Everyone shakes his head at “excessive” or “inappropriate” competition—and the “winning-at-all-costs” philosophy that fuels it. One manifestation of such excess is selfdestructive behavior. There are those in business who wear themselves to a frazzle trying to get ahead, as if professional success could compensate them for having turned their private lives into a wasteland. There are those in school who think that subjecting themselves to a grim regimen of nicotine, caffeine, and no sleep is a small price to pay for another few points on the midterm exam. There are those in sports who devastate their bodies in search of a trophy, enduring hypothermia, hypoglycemia, and dehydration to the point of double vision and hallucinations. Never far behind this physical punishment is the psychological torment that waits to be unleashed on a loser.

  Most people who speak of competitive abuses, though, are thinking of how we break the rules in order to win. In athletics, this may take the form of point-shaving, college recruiting scandals, performance drugs—all of which are quickly becoming as commonplace as six-and seven-figure salaries for sports stars. The playing field is also where we find “excessive” violence: immobilizing one’s opponent by playing dirty, for example. The competitive pressures behind “winning ugly,” as it is sometimes called, are hardly confined to the pros; one need only attend a Little League game to witness a kind of institutionalized child abuse.

  It would be a mistake, however, to restrict a discussion of cheating to athletics. A news dispatch from the 1985 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science began as follows:

  Medical leaders and journal editors agreed today that highly competitive pressures in modern science were provoking cases of outright fraud and an even wider range of “white lies” and deceptions that they said were eroding the integrity of science. . . . Dr. Robert G. Petersdorf, vice chancellor for health sciences at the University of California at San Diego, said . . . the competition to win academic promotions and Federal research grants was causing an undetermined number of scientists to exaggerate or cheat in reporting research they had done.1

  Consider also the wide range of unethical and sometimes illegal behaviors in political campaigns: smearing opponents, accepting and laundering illicit contributions, tapping phones, stealing documents, forging letters, and burying all of this under an avalanche of lies. (The point of Watergate, remember, was to win a contest.) Then there are the bribes and sabotage that have come to be seen as a routine part of doing business, the selective use of evidence and the hundred other dirty tricks that are common practice among lawyers, the way the truth is stretched for effect when journalists compete for space and recognition, the fact that premedical students sometimes ruin each other’s experiments. Pick your field; if people are competing, many of them are going outside of the boundaries that have been established to delimit acceptable ways to win.

  There are accepted and remarkably uniform ways of dealing with competitive abuses. Responding to rule-breakers is itself governed by rules. If you are a conservative, you will make sure that each wrongdoer is punished individually. The severity of the punishment will vary: When medical researcher John Darsee faked electrocardiogram data in 1981, he was stripped of his right to practice medicine in New York. When the Bank of Boston engaged in what was widely called a money-laundering scheme, it was fined the equivalent of about one day’s after-tax profits.2 Regardless of how stiff the penalty, the point is that each person who goes too far in an effort to beat out the competition is investigated and disciplined as if he were the only person who had ever done such a thing and as if he had acted out of sheer perversity.

  Liberal, reform-minded people are less interested in punishing than in exhorting competitors to obey the rules and avoid getting carried away with the race to win. They are fond of unearthing an examp
le of exceptional sportsmanship—a college coach who refuses to pay his athletes under the table, a tennis player who walks off the court arm in arm with her opponent—and they hold up this model to others. Competitors are told that the only thing that matters is how the game is played, that abuses can be eliminated if they would only “make more sportsmanlike gestures such as shaking hands or helping an opponent to his feet”3 or “eliminate all authoritarian people from coaching”4 or “replac[e] the term opponent with associate.”5 Thomas Tutko and William Bruns urge us: “Let’s compete, let’s play to win, but let’s keep it all in perspective. . . . To learn to compete and face a challenge, to learn to accept victory and adjust to defeat, is quite different from a philosophy whereby one individual or team must emerge as a victor.”6 (Of course they fail to explain how it is possible to compete in such a way that one individual or team does not emerge as a victor.)

  Underlying both approaches—isolating and punishing an individual who cheats and cautioning competitors about going overboard—is a single assumption. The assumption is that the ugly measures people use to get ahead represent a contamination of true competition. Thus, sports writer John Underwood says that cheating “defiles” competition,”7 that violence has “perverted the good name of sport.”8 For William Bennett, now the U.S. Secretary of Education, violence is a “degradation of the game,”9 while for Garrett Hardin, bloodiness is “only an accident of competition.”10 This is also the position of James Michener, who declared the problem “is not with competition per se but with the violence that excessive competition arouses.”11 The conservative’s insistence that the fault lies with the individual competitors and the liberal’s careful condemnation of inappropriate competition are really not so far apart. In both cases, competition itself is rescued from any blame. If we get rid of the troublemakers, if we don’t go too far in our quest for victory, then there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the win/lose structure.