by Alfie Kohn
Trying to be number one in all situations may be rooted in selfesteem needs, but it can be driven by force of habit as well. We simply become accustomed to thinking along these lines. It may be fruitful to monitor one’s own competitiveness as it makes itself felt in various situations—and then make a conscious effort to tame this impulse. (“Why did I just interrupt him again? I’m trying to prove to everyone that I’m cleverer than he is. What if I just sat back and listened to what he had to say?” “Why am I resolving to go on a diet again—just because a woman who’s thinner than I walked into the room? There are always going to be women thinner than I! Big deal!”) A directed awareness of our own competitiveness can help us to confront and transcend the reflexive urge to outdo everyone else.
All of these considerations are particularly relevant to raising or teaching children. A child’s performance should never be compared with that of someone else (including a sibling, a classmate, or oneself as a child) in order to motivate her to do better. Affection and approval should not be made contingent on a child’s performance. This means more than offering transparent consolations to a child who has lost. (“Oh. Well, as long as you did your best, honey.”) It means being genuinely unconcerned with the results of competitive encounters in which she is involved, including victories. We should be particularly alert to the subtle and insidious ways in which we encourage our children to tie their feelings of self-worth to winning; so long as we need them to be the best in their class, they will get the message and require the same of themselves. The result, as we have seen, is not excellence but anxiety, self-doubt, hostility, and a decline in intrinsic motivation, among other things.
The psychological and interpersonal damage wrought by competition is so severe that we should also let children know of it in explicit terms. There are school programs to tell children about the abuse of drugs, including tobacco and alcohol. Why not do the same with regard to mutually exclusive goal attainment? Surely the evidence is clear enough and the stakes high enough. Granted that what we do is more important than what we say; above all, we should not set children against one another and we should not act in such a way as to present them with competitive role models. But it also may be helpful to teach them—adjusting the lesson to their level of development, of course—about the myths of competition and the respects in which cooperation offers a healthier alternative. After all, we currently train children to compete (as chapter 2 describes), so we would not be moving from value-free education to indoctrination, but from a lesson in favor of competition to one against it. Let us show our children both how and why to cooperate.
***
All of this concerns intentional competition, the inclination to be better than others, which is a matter of values and self-esteem. There is every reason to attend to both in an effort to become less competitive. Still, the effectiveness of such efforts is circumscribed by the structure of our economic system, our schooling, and our leisure activities. If these are set up so as to condition one person’s success on another’s failure, then a healthy noncompetitive attitude will seem peculiar and downright maladaptive. It will, in any event, be difficult to sustain.
When I began to think about competition, I saw structural and intentional competition as reciprocally related in a fashion so perfectly balanced that they caused each other to the same degree. Over time I have come to revise this position, finally realizing that the structural level is far more significant. It is possible to minimize the importance of winning and losing, but to do so requires one to swim against the current, to ignore what is demanded by the structure of the activity. It is possible to remain on friendly terms with competitors, but the fact that their interests are inversely related to one’s own predisposes each side to view the other with hostility. It is possible to be a “good sport,” but even this runs counter to the competitive imperative.
Let us consider a concrete illustration of how a structure can elicit particular behaviors. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University conducted a novel experiment on the effects of imprisonment by choosing 21 male college students to take on the roles of guards and inmates in a very realistic “prison” created in the basement of the psychology building. The 21 subjects were selected from a group of 75 volunteers precisely on the basis of their normality: they were stable and scored in the middle range of a personality profile. Equally important, they were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard. Almost immediately, the subjects began to take on the pathological characteristics of their respective roles. The guards delighted in devising arbitrary tasks and absurd rules for the inmates, demanding absolute obedience and forcing them to humiliate each other. The prisoners became passive and obedient, taking their frustration out on each other and otherwise assuming the role of victim. As the guards became more abusive, the prisoners became more helpless and dependent. The patterns became so pronounced that Zimbardo grew alarmed and ended what was to have been a two-week experiment after only six days.
Given the design of this experiment, what happened cannot be explained in terms of the individuals involved. The researchers, like the subjects, had been inclined to “focus on personality traits as internal dispositions for individuals to respond in particular ways,” thus “underestimating] the subtle power of situational forces to control and reshape their behavior.” Most of us make the same error, Zimbardo contends, leading us to try to solve problems by “changing the people, by motivating them, isolating them . . . and so on.” In fact, he concludes, “to change behavior we must discover the institutional supports which maintain the existing undesirable behavior and then design programs to alter these environments.”4
This is nowhere more true than in the case of competition. We are constantly reinforced for wanting to be number one because this orientation is appropriate to the win/lose structure in which we keep finding ourselves. It is the fact of having to participate in contests that leads us to try to outdo others. And it is the fact of having to participate in contests that we are going to have to change if we want to move in healthier directions.
Nearly seventy years ago, John Harvey and his colleagues distinguished between “deliberate” and “involuntary” competition, which are roughly comparable to what I have been calling “intentional” and “structural,” respectively. “In the whole moral environment provided by our civilisation, involuntary competition easily becomes deliberate,” Harvey concluded. Among the personality traits that involuntary competition elicits, he says, is selfishness. “We would not set out to generate [this quality] deliberately, but we cannot escape from doing so incidentally and inadvertently so long as our commercial practice pits one against another, as now it does.”5
William Sadler similarly insists that the structure determines how individuals look at the world:
The value orientation which holds competition high is perpetuated as individuals participate in institutions which help to shape their perception of reality. There is, in other words, a convergence of social forces which fosters a common perception of the world so that it is viewed in competitive terms. Added to this institutional factor is the dissipation of forces that would inhibit competition.6
The evidence offered in chapters 5 and 6 substantiates this view. Our psychological state and our relationships with others not only are correlated with the extent of our intentional competitiveness but are changed by a framework of structural competition. Deutsch, to cite yet another study, found that “the psychological orientations of the subjects [including] their views of themselves and of the others in their group were considerably different as a function of the distributive system under which they worked.”7 Another sort of evidence is provided by Susan Shirk’s account of how Chinese students, who were cooperatively inclined, began to stop helping each other when a competitive structure was imposed on them.8 Closer to home, one need only watch what happens to courteous and cooperative drivers when they move to a city where an informal but powerful structure demands competiti
ve behavior on the roads: in remarkably short order, individual personality patterns shift to accommodate the structure.9
The primacy of structural forces also can be demonstrated by showing that a cooperative framework changes behaviors and attitudes. After reviewing several strategies for lowering intentional competition, Terry Orlick wrote: “It may be more fruitful to introduce new games than to change old orientations. We may come closer to achieving our objectives if we simply let cooperative games do the shaping.”10 When values follow from the structure, moreover, they are generalized throughout an individual’s life, as Paul Breer and Edwin Locke found:
To the extent that a man is rewarded for putting the organization’s goals first, harmonizing his own efforts with those of his colleagues, and making himself personally attractive to the people around him, he will develop situationally specific orientations in which co-operation, harmony, teamwork, etc. are seen as instrumental to success, intrinsically pleasurable, and morally desirable. From his job, such orientations can be expected to spill over to his family, community, and even society as a whole. This, it will be recalled, is precisely the sort of thing we found in the laboratory.11
A final example of the effects of structural cooperation is provided by Robert Axelrod. In the course of discussing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game (in which a cooperative strategy proves most effective), Axelrod cites a fascinating historical illustration. During World War I, army battalions that faced each other from their respective trenches often agreed not to shoot—a kind of “live and let live” understanding that emerged spontaneously. This mutual restraint was, of course, infuriating to the high commands of both sides, but soldiers had the temerity to persist in not killing each other. Obviously they had not been predisposed to work together, having been trained to hate each other; structural cooperation took root in spite of their attitudes. In fact, the new arrangement changed these attitudes. Axelrod cites an incident in which a shot was fired inadvertently one day, prompting a German to call out, “We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt.” This apparently genuine concern, Axelrod comments, “goes well beyond a merely instrumental effort to prevent retaliation. . . . The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other’s welfare.”12 Individual orientations, in other words, were affected by the structure.
HOW TO PREVENT SOCIAL CHANGE13
Making our society less competitive ultimately depends on reducing structural competition. Unfortunately, bringing about structural change of any kind requires overcoming enormous resistance. It is much easier to describe how change can be blocked than how it can be furthered. For those so inclined, then, here are five simple ways to perpetuate the status quo.
1. LIMIT YOUR VISION: The long-standing American tradition of ignoring the structural causes of social and individual problems was mentioned in chapter 7. By pretending, for example, that psychological disturbance has nothing to do with the societal forces that shape personality development, you can help see to it that those forces continue unabated. It follows that all intervention should be done at the individual level. It is fine to help, say, homeless people on a case-by-case basis, but inquiring into the policy decisions and economic arrangements that have brought about their predicament would only serve to invite drastic changes—and this is what we want to avoid at all costs. Similarly, if we continue to treat each example of corporate wrongdoing (from illegal dumping of toxic wastes to bribing of public officials) as if it has occurred in a vacuum, then we can manage to preserve the system responsible for these acts.
2. ADAPT: The best way to keep the status quo intact is to make sure that individuals adjust themselves to serve its needs. Such adaptation once was enforced by crude, authoritarian methods of “reeducation.” Today this is hardly necessary. A wealth of advice is available on how to become successful—what to wear, how to negotiate, and so forth—and virtually all of it proceeds from the premise that you should adjust yourself to conditions as you find them. Adaptation is a critical part of the self-help model: you must succeed within the institutions and according to the rules that already exist. To do well is to fit in, and to fit in is to fortify the structures into which you are being fit.
3. THINK ABOUT YOURSELF: Implicit in any exhortations to succeed by “giving them what they want” is the suggestion that you should be totally preoccupied with your own well-being. The more you limit your concerns to yourself, the more you help to sustain the larger system. But this does not apply merely to material success. Even therapeutic and spiritual enterprises are useful for preserving the status quo because in encouraging you to attend to your own needs, they effectively direct attention away from social structures. Groom yourself and let the rest of the world go on its way—what better strategy is there for perpetuating existing structures? A few people may argue, it is true, that personal growth can be a route to social change. But most of the human potential movement will not require you to wrestle with this question, since social change is irrelevant to its goals and techniques.14
4. BE “REALISTIC”: Fortunately, it is not necessary for you to defend the larger system. You can even nod in sympathetic agreement with someone who indicts it. But it is crucial that this nodding be accompanied by a shrug. Phrases such as “like it or not” and “that’s just the way it is” should be employed liberally in order to emphasize that nothing can be done about the larger picture. Such protestations of powerlessness are actually very powerful, of course, since they make sure that things are left exactly as they are. Every person who is encouraged to take such a stance is another person rescued from social activism.
Occasionally a critic will refuse to resign himself to the way things are or to believe that we are helpless to make change. Such an individual should immediately be labeled “idealistic.” Do not be concerned about the vaguely complimentary connotations of having ideals. It will be understood that an idealist is someone who does not understand “the world as it is” (“world” = “our society”; “as it is” = “as it will always be”). This label efficiently calls attention to the critic’s faulty understanding of reality or “human nature” and insures that he is not taken seriously. Those who are “pragmatic,” by contrast, know that we must always work within the confines of what we are given. After all, if alternative models really were workable, we would already be using them.
Appeals to realism have the virtue of allowing you to avoid messy discussions about the value of a critic’s position (and thus of the status quo). Why bother with such issues when you can dismiss his vision as “well-meaning but unworkable”? Challenging the rightness of what he is proposing will only slow him down; it is the appeal to practicality that produces the knockout. Call someone wrongheaded or even evil and a lengthy discussion may follow. Call him utopian or naive and there is nothing more to be said.15 This method of dismissing models of change is uniquely effective since it sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people insist that an alternative arrangement cannot work, they will be right. Its failure then can be cited as substantiation of one’s original skepticism. No one uses this maneuver more skillfully than policymakers who are mistrustful of public institutions. Because of their conviction that governments can do nothing right, they divert funds from public schools and hospitals. When the inevitable crisis develops, they say, “You see?”
Appeals to realism can insure that institutions which threaten to promote social change (e.g., legislative bodies, universities, the media) do nothing but reflect the status quo. In the name of democracy, descriptive accuracy, and objective journalism, respectively, these institutions can be tamed and made into powerful instruments for perpetuating whatever is in place. Here, to take a tiny example, is New York Times education writer Fred Hechinger:
Regrettably, the importance of the “message” has also invaded children’s television. . . . [One] episode of “The Flintstones,” a favorite children’s cartoon, had a
hotly contested baseball game end in a tie, followed by celebrations of brotherly and sisterly love—hardly the real aim in any normal child’s view of competitive games.16
This exemplary criticism should be studied carefully. Hechinger is demonstrating how to dismiss as inappropriate any scenario that does not conform to the existing values and structures of our society. To challenge our current practices is idealistic and, worse, contains a “message.” To reinforce our current practices is realistic and contains no message. Most children’s programs do not offend Hechinger because they display, and thereby shape, “normal” people—i.e., those who are intent on winning at any cost.
5. RATIONALIZE: It is easier for critics to oppose existing institutions when those who defend and profit from them are obviously opposed to social change. You can make it more difficult for these critics—and salve your own conscience at the same time—by claiming that your real reason for acting as you do is to “change the system from within.” Like most people who talk this way, of course, you do not actually have to make change. On the contrary, even if this really were your goal, you would be permitted to work only for insignificant reforms that never come close to challenging the structures themselves. By becoming part of these structures, you can proceed to seek personal aggrandizement while at the same time contributing your talents to something you profess to find problematic. (A variation 011 this maneuver is to claim that you are going to do so for only a short time—as if it were a simple matter to leave the fast lane and get over to the exit ramp.) If you are audacious enough, you can even rationalize your participation as the most effective way to change the system. The more people who accept this reasoning and follow your example, the more secure is that system.