No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  If you were an advocate of competition, this is precisely the tack you would take. No matter how frequently they seem to appear, you would argue that abusive, self-destructive, violent, or immoral behaviors are corruptions of real competition, which is in its essence as virtuous and healthy as these “exceptions” are nasty and neurotic. To argue in this way is also to enjoy an appreciable rhetorical advantage, since such a position appears pleasingly moderate: you are not saying all competition is bad, but merely that it should not be done to excess. What could be more reasonable?

  This position coincides with the entrenched reluctance of Americans to consider structural explanations for problems. We prefer to hold individuals responsible for whatever happens or, at the most, to find a convenient proximate cause. Rarely are events understood in their historical or economic or social context. As one of many possible examples of this, consider how we respond when our children fail to learn. Typically we insist that they are not studying hard enough or else we put the problem down to poor teaching. What we do not do is acknowledge that a two-tiered educational system funnels most of the promising teachers and the privileged children to the private sector, virtually guaranteeing that students without the resources to follow will receive an inferior education. We do not ask why learning is defined in terms of a standardized test score, why obedience is valued above critical thinking—and we certainly do not look at the institutions in our country whose existence depends on a passive, acceptant public of precisely the sort that our schools manufacture.

  The story is much the same when we confront poverty or crime or most other social ills.* As for psychological problems, we do not even recognize them to be social in nature; the trouble is framed as an “illness,” purely an individual matter. This way of looking at the world has several consequences. It often results in blaming the victim, as many observers have pointed out. It leaves the foundations of our society undisturbed and even unexamined. And it all but assures that the problem itself will not go away.

  In the case of competition, the root cause of abuses is the competitive structure itself. “Abuses,” then, is really something of a misnomer since these actions do not represent the contamination of competition but rather its logical conclusion. In the last chapter, I argued that hostility is virtually built into an arrangement where someone else’s fate is inversely related to your own. So it is that a structural imperative to beat others invites the use of any means available. “The aim of competition is to win and the temptation is to win at any cost,” wrote Arthur Combs. “Although it begins with the laudable aim of encouraging production, competition quickly breaks down to a struggle to win at any price.”12 This process is part of the natural trajectory of competition itself. The only distinction that a competitor qua competitor knows is that between winning and losing; other distinctions, such as between moral and immoral, are foreign to the enterprise and must be, as it were, imported. They do not belong. The only goal that a competitor (again, qua competitor) has is victory; the only good is what contributes to this goal. If a new goal is introduced—particularly one that interferes with winning, such as staying within the guidelines of appropriate conduct—it is likely to be pushed aside. This does not mean that people who do so don’t understand how to compete; on the contrary, they understand perfectly. Their behavior follows from the structure.

  What this means is that we can no longer content ourselves with simply condemning cheaters or feeling sorry for self-destructive competitors. To do so is not only shortsighted but hypocritical; we set up a structure where the goal is victory and then blame people when they follow through. Pious admonitions about not getting carried away in competition, however well-meaning, are just exercises in selfdeception. If we are serious about eliminating ugliness, we will have to eliminate the competitive structure that breeds the ugliness.

  This perspective is radical and disturbing, but I think it fits the facts—that is, the frequency and pervasiveness of improper actions during competitive encounters—far better than the “contamination” view. Most people do not even keep the facts in view, failing to see the connections between campaign illegalities, scientific fraud, corporate trickery, and the use of steroids in college sports. Each appears in a different section of the newspaper, and it never dawns on us that there is a pattern. Once we acknowledge that these diverse shady activities all take place in the context of competition, we are more likely to see that the problem lies with the common denominator.

  A few writers have identified competition itself as the problem. Anne Strick’s critique of the American legal system, as we have already seen, questions the premise that justice is best served by an adversarial (i.e., competitive) model. She goes on to argue that this model is largely responsible for the abuses so common in the profession. “The Watergate lawyers were only doing what came naturally,” Strick writes, because “‘enemies’ is what our legal system is all about.” The need to beat the Other side in the courtroom is the basis of “diversion, distortion, and direct deceit. . . . Where polarity shapes thinking and winning is the orthodoxy to which men chiefly adhere, deceit is absolutely justifiable.”14

  Gunther Lüschen realized that the same is true on the playing field: “By and large the characteristic of a contest as a zero-sum game seems to explain why cheating should go on at all levels—even where the odds at stake are not high.”15 By definition, all competition is zero-sum (in the broad sense of mutually exclusive goal attainment), so the invitation to cheat is always present. George Orwell made the point even more strongly. “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,” he wrote. “It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.”16

  Empirical research lends credence to this view. A sports psychologist found that

  both athletes and nonathletes used lower-level egocentric moral reasoning when thinking about dilemmas in sport than when addressing moral issues in other contexts. These and other findings suggest that moral norms which prescribe equal consideration of all people are often suspended during competition in favor of a more egocentric moral perspective.17

  These findings also suggest that competition itself is responsible for the development of a lower moral standard. Indeed, another pair of researchers point to “evidence that regular sport participants become more committed to winning at any cost and less committed to values of fairness and justice as their competitive experience increases.”18 Ironically, Michael Novak, whom we already know to be a staunch defender of competition, agrees that sports naturally lead participants to try to win at any cost:

  The true practise of sport goes on, beneath the moralistic mythology of virtue and clean-living. Basketball without deception could not survive. Football without aggression, holding, slugging, and other violations—only a few of which the referees actually will censure—could not be played. Baseball without cunning, trickery, and pressing for advantage would scarcely be a contest. Our sports are lively with the sense of evil. . . . Sports provide an almost deliberate exercise in pushing the psyche to cheat and take advantage, to be ruthless, cruel, deceitful, vengeful, and aggressive.19

  However appalling one might find Novak’s cheerful endorsement of these attributes, he is accurately reporting that they form the basis of sport, that they issue from the contests’ very nature. It remains only to emphasize once again that they are not confined to sports. They are to be found, albeit in different forms, in virtually any kind of competitive activity—and, for that matter, throughout a culture defined by a competitive worldview. Bertrand Russell put it well:

  The trouble does not lie simply with the individual, nor can a single individual prevent it in his own isolated case. The trouble arises from the generally received philosophy of life, according to which life is a contest, a competition, in which respect is to be accorded to the victor. This view leads to an undue cultivation of the will at the expense of the senses and the intellect.20

  What, then
, of sportsmanship and other calls to stay within certain guidelines? First, the notion is partly cosmetic; it offers a patina of respectability for the enterprise of making other people lose. The social pressures associated with the latter are far more powerful, and our sanctimonious noises about being a good sport allow us to condemn rule-breakers when it suits our purposes.21 More important is the fact that sportsmanship is an artificial concept. It would not exist except for competition. Only within the framework of trying to win is it meaningful to talk about carrying this out in a graceful or virtuous fashion.* If we did not compete, we would not have to try to curb the effects of competition by invoking sportsmanship; we might well be working with other people in the first place.

  Even viewed in this light, though, the question of sportsmanship reminds us that not every businessperson resorts to sleazy tactics to get ahead and not every football player tries to disable his opponent. There are plenty of factors that encourage or discourage the use of inappropriate techniques. One such factor is the level of the competitor’s moral development. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that the maturity of an athlete’s moral reasoning is inversely proportional to the number of aggressive acts he or she engages in or views as legitimate.22 Other factors include the severity of the penalty, the likelihood that violators will be caught, and the perceived willingness of other participants to abide by the rules. The implication is that it is possible to try to counteract the natural consequence of the imperative to win and thus reduce the level of intentional competition. It is possible, but we Americans generally do not do so. On the contrary: The trouble with a hypercompetitive culture like ours is that we not only leave the mechanism intact but we create a network of reinforcements for winning at any cost. Cheating and the like can be said to be overdetermined—called forth by both the intrinsic structure of competition and the societal attitude toward it.

  The latter has been remarked on more frequently than the former. In her analysis of lying, Sissela Bok writes:

  The very stress on individualism, on competition, on achieving material success which so marks our society also generates intense pressures to cut corners. To win an election, to increase one’s income, to outsell competitors—such motives impel many to participate in forms of duplicity they might otherwise resist. The more widespread they judge these practices to be, the stronger will be the pressures to join, even compete, in deviousness.23

  The last sentence is crucial: The pressure we feel to be number one creates a vicious circle as we expect others to play dirty and feel justified in breaking the rules ourselves—if not obligated to do so. If I play it straight, the next guy is just going to take advantage of me. To complain, as the lawbreaker often does, that honesty does not pay may be self-serving, but it is largely correct in a competitive society.

  When we dismiss someone as a “loser”—one of our most scathing epithets—we are underscoring the importance of winning. It is not seen as important that we win with restraint or in accordance with ethical principles—just that we win. An athlete who plays dirty develops a reputation as someone to be reckoned with, someone impressive and fearsome; he is “bad” or “tough” in the admiring sense that children use these words. The concrete advantages of such a style also are clear: What’s a 15-yard penalty if you can put the other team’s receiver out for the game? No one gets kept on the team for being a good sport. The more substantial penalties are handed out for losing. Moreover, as Tutko and Bruns observe, “the American culture has built so much guilt into losing that the person who tries to make a healthy adjustment to it—like cracking jokes in the midst of a losing streak—is thought to be a lousy competitor, if not a little crazy.”24 Clearly it is better to be thought overzealous than a lousy competitor.

  The pressure to win at all costs, again, is not limited to athletics. Unethical campaign practices are partly the result of our society’s priorities, as sociologist Amitai Etzioni explained:

  Truth to be told, the Watergate gang is but an extreme manifestation of a much deeper and more encompassing American malaise, the emphasis on success and frequent disregard for the nature of the means it takes to achieve it. Not only high level administration officials, but many Americans as well, seem to have accepted the late football coach Vince Lombardi’s motto, “Winning is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing.” Thus, the executives of ITT who sought to overthrow the government of Chile to protect their goodies, the Mafia [chieftains] who push heroin, the recording company executives who bribe their records onto the top-40 list, and the citizens who shrug off corruption in the local town hall as “that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” all share the same unwholesome attitude. True, the Watergate boys have broken all known American precedents in their violation of fair play, but they are unique chiefly in the magnitude of their crime—not in the basic orientation that underlies it.25

  The tendency to shrug off political corruption as expected and unexceptional is not only distressing but very dangerous—rather like the refusal to differentiate among health hazards on the grounds that “everything is bad for you.” The effect is that politicians know that the reaction to their improprieties, if discovered, probably will not outweigh the fruits of victory. By the same token, the lawyer who resorts to gutter tactics is well aware that his or her win/loss record is what really matters. Marvin Frankel put it this way: “In a system that so values winning and deplores losing, where lawyers are trained to fight for, not to judge their clients, where we learn as advocates not to ‘know’ inconvenient things, moral elegance is not to be expected.”26 Such social pressures, I want to reiterate, merely reinforce the inherent qualities of competition. Our approval of winning at all costs is the secondary inducement to cheat; the primary inducement is the nature of competition itself. It is true that contests without cheating or violence can occur if we successfully introduce considerations that are external to the impetus to win. Such contests seem unobjectionable, however, precisely because the element of competition has been diluted. To point to a morally exemplary lawsuit or an examination where the honors system is respected is not to refute the basic point here. The less competitive a given activity, the less likelihood, all things being equal, of “abuses.” This is consistent with the arguments offered in earlier chapters of this book: the higher the concentration of competition in any interaction, the less likely it is to be enjoyable and the more likely it is to be destructive to our self-esteem, our relationships, our standards of fairness.

  8

  Women and Competition

  I wish it could have been a tie.

  —Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn),

  after defeating her husband in court

  in Adam’s Rib

  Competitive cultures train their members to compete, but the training is not the same for everyone. It is affected by whether one lives downtown or in the country, whether one is born into wealth or poverty. Perhaps the single most important variable—one I have not yet mentioned—is gender. The lessons on when and how to compete, and on how to regard the whole enterprise of competition, are significantly different for boys and girls. Attitudes and behaviors remain different for men and women, with important consequences for the society as a whole.

  The general rule is that American males are simply trained to win. The object, a boy soon gathers, is not to be liked but to be envied, not to reflect but to act, not to be part of a group but to distinguish himself from the others in that group. From her work with children, Carole Ames found that “the consequences of failing in competitive situations appear to have been more ego threatening for males than females.”1 Being number one is an imperative for boys, so a good deal is invested in whether one makes it.

  There has been other research on sex differences. Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin reviewed a number of studies conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, concluding that “boys tend to be more competitive, but the behavior is evidently subject to situational and cultural variations to a considerabl
e degree.”2 In 1979, two researchers surveyed the attitudes of more than twenty-four hundred students from grades two through twelve. At all ages, they discovered, boys were more enthusiastic about competition than girls and more likely to prefer it. Boys were also less enthusiastic about, and less likely to prefer, cooperation.3

  Recent research has confirmed that this disparity does not disappear when we grow up4—which, of course, is hardly news to most of us. The male competitive orientation may manifest itself as blatantly as it did during childhood, as little boys wrestling after school grow into men who sabotage rivals for the vice presidency or vie for an attractive woman or explode in infantile fury on the squash court. Then again, the urge may be tempered, sublimated, rechanneled. Even when grown men eye each other on the street, says one writer, what flashes through their minds is: