by Alfie Kohn
Afterword
In the fall of 1982, a couple of years after considering and rejecting the possibility of writing my graduate thesis on the topic of competition, I found myself irresistibly drawn back to the issue. The research project on which I embarked, at first without much thought to whether it could result in a publishable book, eventually came to dominate my life. Now, a decade after scribbling my first notes on what it means to compete, I want to take a few minutes to look back—and especially to consider what has happened in the six years since No Contest went to press.
Specifically, I’d like to try to answer the questions I’m often asked when I speak on the topic: How have people reacted to the book and its thesis? Is our culture becoming more or less competitive? What new research has been published on the topic? (Now that I think about it, I cannot remember anyone actually asking the last question, but that is certainly not going to prevent me from answering it.)
The first thing that happened was that I received invitations to appear on more than one hundred TV and radio programs, including Donahue, to say nothing of interviews for newspaper and magazine articles. On Donahue, I was asked such questions as, “Well, if you’re against competition, isn’t that just because you’re a loser?” (I invite you to consider how you would deal with this question in eight seconds on national television.) I realized pretty quickly that all this attention signified not that the book’s reasoning was seen as cogent but rather that its position was seen as outrageously controversial. It was not that I had offered a meaty argument so much as that I had turned our most sacred cow into hamburger.
Today I am sometimes described as the country’s leading critic of competition, but of course there is not much competition for that title. I have been invited to lecture at some organizations whose relentless pursuit of competitive advantage—they might as well have a bust of Vince Lombardi on display in the lobby—leads me to wonder whether my name is being circulated by an organization called Rent-a-Gadfly.
The reaction to my remarks on competition usually sorts itself into three categories. First, there are the people who nod continuously as I speak, as if to say “Yes! I’ve had these thoughts for fifteen years, but I’ve been embarrassed to say them out loud!” To my surprise, quite a few people react this way, but since attendance at most of my lectures is voluntary, these people, like those who take the trouble to write to me, probably do not constitute a representative sample of the American public. Nevertheless, I am always delighted to connect with kindred spirits and, if I can, to offer them further analysis and evidence with which they can work to replace competition with cooperation.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who accuse me of being either a Communist or a wimp.* In person, these people sit with their arms tightly folded, scowling or smirking, convinced that anyone who thinks competition is undesirable and unnecessary must live on Neptune. If they bother to stay for the question period, their comments usually begin with: “What you say is very nice in theory, but . . .” I enjoy talking to these people, too, in part because, like them, I am a skeptic. (Where we differ is that I would prefer to see skepticism directed at the status quo rather than employed in its service.) Perhaps I can plant a seed, I figure; even those who dismiss my critique may find that something has sprouted the next time they see a person’s spirit crushed, or performance obviously impaired, by a win/lose structure.
Between these two categories sit the listeners (or readers) who are strongly inclined to resist the news that competition is counterproductive but find themselves unable to wish it away. Even though these people are gravely troubled by the implications of my argument, they are willing to question the conventional wisdom. One woman came up to me after a lecture, frowning, and confessed, “Now I’m really disoriented.” This made my day.
One very specific response to the case against competition may also be worth mentioning here. I am regularly informed that we would be doing children a disservice by minimizing competition since they need to be prepared for the rivalry they will encounter when they grow up. My response is that we need to work on two tracks at once: preparing children for what they will find in our society, and preparing them, if need be, to change what they find. To concentrate only on the latter, keeping our eye fixed on a distant goal, may make life difficult for children in the short term. But to concentrate only on the former ensures that their children will encounter the same destructive institutions and backward values.
Beyond this, however, the fact is that students in our society already are well acquainted with competition. Even if some experience with trying to triumph over others were useful, children have more than they could ever need. Imagine a school that studiously avoids competition, in the classroom or on the playing field, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. We may be confident that not a single graduate of this school, on entering college or the work force, would suddenly exclaim, “Whoa! What’s all this about ‘competition’?” Our best efforts to promote cooperation notwithstanding, children in this country are all too familiar with win/lose activities.
What students need is not more of the same but experience with alternative arrangements so that they can achieve a sense of perspective about the competition that proliferates in our culture. While a case can be made that students would benefit from a curricular unit in which they explicitly consider the effects of competition, talking about it is quite different from being immersed in it. (By way of analogy, consider the distinction between teaching schoolchildren about religion and indoctrinating them to be religious.) Moreover, there is no reason to imagine that having children participate in competitive activities week after week after week could provide any incremental benefit. The rationale for doing so, if made explicit, would look something like a sign I once saw tacked to a wall in a sixth-grade classroom: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
While I have continued to write and speak on competition, I have also been following three other lines of inquiry growing out of that work. First, I have been drawn to the field of education and, specifically, to the use of cooperative learning as an alternative to competition. The practice of having students work together in pairs or small groups was already attracting attention before No Contest was published. The research literature and practical record of success connected with this approach have mushroomed since then. I have discussed the topic in chapter 10, which is new to this edition.
Second, the question of whether competition is just part of “human nature” (chapter 2) led me to look at that concept more carefully, and specifically to ask whether selfishness, aggression, and other of our less noble attributes are really more natural than generosity, caring, and empathy. The result of that investigation was published in 1990 as The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life, and it, in turn, has led me to try to devise strategies for promoting “prosocial” behaviors and attitudes in children.
Finally, the study of competition has opened up a broader issue, namely, the consequences of using other extrinsic motivators (discussed briefly on pp. [>]). If any assumption drives our culture more powerfully than the faith that competition is valuable, it is the belief that all problems can be solved if only we find a big enough carrot to dangle in front of people. My next book (also to be published by Houghton Mifflin) will consider the unhappy consequences of manipulating people with rewards—at work, at school, and at home.
Is competition on the upswing today or has its day come and gone? I have seen no polls or studies seeking to measure the pervasiveness of competition in American life, much less any longitudinal data attempting to identify trends. I am more than a little suspicious of sweeping, facile pronouncements of epochal transformations currently under way, and, frankly, I don’t even know what would count as evidence for the beginning of a significant change regarding something like competition.
I will say that I am heartened by the move toward cooperative learning in many schools and, to some extent, by the g
rowing interest in real teamwork and “quality” among some managers. I am discouraged, however, by the fact that competitiveness has become more of a buzzword among politicians, businesspeople, and educators than it was even half a dozen years ago.
I am heartened by recent news reports about a school in Indiana where every willing student can be part of an athletic team or the cheerleading squad or the choir. Its “no-cut” policy in extracurricular activities has resulted in huge increases in participation and far fewer problems than some had anticipated.1 I am discouraged by recent news reports about elaborate “Little Miss” beauty contests for three- to six-year-old girls2 and pressure-filled interscholastic academic contests that reduce learning to a matter of preparing for victory at a quiz show.3
I am heartened when I see dissidents starting to raise questions about the value of competition in publications as diverse as a psychoanalytic journal (1986)4 and magazines for guitar players (1989),5 music teachers (1990),6 and photographers (1992).7 I am discouraged by the fact that most of the popular press, notably magazines intended for women, continues to treat competition as inevitable, desirable, amusing, or all three. Not every such article is as egregious as one recent quiz for teenage girls (“Compete, Don’t Retreat!”), bursting with cheerful exclamation points, which awards more points to readers who know enough to put their desire to win ahead of their loyalty to friends.8 In magazines for parents, articles often advise against putting too much pressure on children to win. Such cautions, however, are accompanied by a de rigueur concession that, “of course,” competition in moderation is appropriate and productive.*
I am appalled when I read that forty-nine teenagers from one school district have been hospitalized for depression, suicide attempts, or substance abuse, all apparently connected to the stress caused by academic competition. (The school administrators responded by citing the “failure to teach adolescents coping skills.” If, by way of comparison, a factory’s polluting smokestacks had sent nearby residents to the hospital, presumably the factory manager would not have the audacity to attribute the problem to a failure to buy respirators.)9 I am horrified when I read that some of the people who were killed when a plane crashed and burned on a runway in Los Angeles might have lived were it not for two men standing in front of the exit door, competing over who would get out first.10 It is hard to take any consolation in such tragedy save for the faint hope that some people may begin to understand that competition by its very nature is a problem.
The unwillingness to acknowledge this is, I am convinced, the chief obstacle to freeing ourselves from the quicksand. People proudly tell me stories of someone they know who didn’t care whether he lost, or of some competitive game in which participants were exhorted not to place too much importance on the outcome. These are steps in the right direction, and I am pleased to hear about them. But they do nothing to challenge the underlying structure of mutually exclusive goal attainment, which is the ultimate cause of the problems detailed in the preceding pages. This is often difficult to grasp in a culture that can imagine change only at the level of individual attitudes and behaviors. If next week we Americans suddenly began to recognize the destructive consequences of competition, books would start to appear in the stores with titles like “Ten Steps to a Less Competitive You.”
That competition itself may be the problem is rarely considered, least of all in the context of what goes on in the workplace.11 Nevertheless, research over the last few years continues to remind us of the importance of structural factors. In one study, people led to expect that they were going to be working cooperatively with strangers responded empathically when those strangers received a reward or punishment. But those who thought they would be competing against the others responded counterempathically—that is, smiling at their discomfort and grimacing at their good fortune.12 Another study showed how people put into a situation of team competition tended to reject friendly overtures from people on the other side and came to view the members of that group as an undifferentiated They.13
In chapter 7, I argued that cheating and other problems result at least as much from competition itself as from the moral failings of the individual. Several recent comments by people in different fields illustrate the naivete of condemning ugly behavior while taking no steps to challenge the basic win/lose framework.
• In sports, a safety for the New York Giants points out that he and other football players are
expected and required to be good sportsmen when we are engaged in an endeavor that is hostile and aggressive . . . to go from being gentlemanly and following the rules of society to people who play violently and aggressively for two or three hours on Sunday. . . . It’s not easy to do, especially when people across the line of scrimmage are literally the enemy.14
• In politics, a campaign consultant shrugs off the widespread indignation at negative advertisements, observing that
a political campaign, like a trial in a court of law, has but one objective—to win. Staying within the confines of the truth, a candidate or consultant will use every available legal means to attain that objective. If you don’t play by the rules of the game, your opposition will.15
• In business, the director of an organization called the Ethics Resource Center says we are kidding ourselves if we think the corporate world is going to be changed by putting business students through ethics courses:
As long as you have a business culture that puts people in impossible situations—“your division has to grow 7 percent in the next year or else we’re going to be No. a in the field and if we are, you’re going to be job-hunting”—you’re going to have people shipping inferior goods, juggling the books, bribing when they have to, trampling workers beneath them and generally conducting themselves in the time-honored tradition: Results, and only results, count.16
• In education, seventy-three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were disciplined for “cheating,” mostly for working in small groups to write computer programs together for fear of being unable to keep up with the class otherwise. “Many feel that the required work is clearly impossible to do by straightforward [i.e., solitary] means,” according to the faculty member who chairs MIT’s Committee on Discipline.17
Each of these examples invites us to shift our gaze from maladjusted individuals to a maladaptive system. The problem is that it is easy to suspend an athlete whose aggression slips over the edge of “acceptability,” to condemn the creators of nasty political ads, to jail greedy Wall Street lawbreakers, or to punish students who work collaboratively. It is not so easy to undertake social change of the sort that must follow an admission that something is wrong with competition per se.
The growing clamor to make hospitals, schools, industries, and now even government more “competitive” raises once again the question of whether this goal has anything to do with reaching excellence, or whether we have simply blurred the two ideas, overlooking what should be an obvious fact—that beating others and doing quality work are two completely different concepts. Whether the first leads to the second is a legitimate question, but the answer, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that it almost always does not. The trouble with our schools, for example, is that they are much too competitive, which helps to explain why so little learning is taking place.18
A similar dynamic is now at work in the field of health care, where many institutions are being pressured for the first time to become “competitive.” More hospitals and clinics are being run by for-profit corporations; many institutions, forced to battle for “customers,” seem to value a skilled director of marketing more highly than a skilled caregiver. As in any other economic sector, the race for profits translates into pressure to reduce costs, and the easiest way to do it here is to cut back on services to unprofitable patients, that is, those who are more sick than rich.
This is exactly what insurance companies are doing under the banner of “competitiveness”: denying coverage to those who need it most. In many cases, the
re is not even any greater efficiency to show for the greater inequity. “Among providers, competition has led to a stunning round of spending on facilities and equipment in an attempt to lure patients from other providers—and never mind if the new facilities are [unnecessary].”19 The result: hospital costs are actually higher in areas where there is more competition for patients.20
There are few pockets of the U.S. economy in which competition between firms is introduced for the first time. When people talk about increasing the competition in a given sector, they often mean abandoning government regulation in order to more nearly approximate a laissez-faire or “pure” market. Recent developments of this kind, such as in the airline industry, serve only to increase one’s skepticism about the value of competition.21
But the data with which I am more familiar concern the effects of competition within a given workplace. Add to the research cited in chapter 3 a bushel of new studies that Dean Tjosvold of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia conducted at utility companies, manufacturing plants, engineering firms, and many other kinds of organizations. Over and over again, Tjosvold has found that “cooperation makes a work force motivated,” whereas “serious competition undermines coordination.”22 (Interestingly, one study from Georgia State University discovered that competition reduces the quality of one’s performance, even if one happens to be a rhesus monkey!)23