No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

23. For example, see H. L. Rheingold and D. F. Hay, “Prosocial Behavior of the Very Young”; Marian Radke Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn Waxier, “The Emergence and Functions of Prosocial Behaviors in Young Children”; Yarrow et al., “Learning Concern”; James H. Bryan, “Prosocial Behavior”; Maya Pines, “Good Samaritans at Age Two?”; and my own “That Loving Feeling—When Does It Begin?” Yarrow and Waxier write as follows: “The capabilities for compassion, for various kinds of reaching out to others in a giving sense are viable and effective responses early in life. . . . Very young children were often finely discriminative and responsive to others’ need states” (pp. 78–79).

  24. Rheingold and Hay, p. 101. On the other hand, Roderic Gorney claims that the view “that human beings are predisposed to be not individualistic and competitive but social and cooperative . . . [is] endorsed by the majority of students of human social biology and evolution” (Human Agenda, p. 140). Also see Martin L. Hoffman, “Is Altruism Part of Human Nature?”

  25. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, p. 204.

  26. Stephen Jay Gould, personal communication, 1984.

  27. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter III, p. 62. Thus, Patrick Bateson writes that “the restriction of differential survival to mean simply conflict is an obvious abuse of Darwin’s thinking” (“Cooperation and Competition,” p. 55).

  28. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, p. 222. Similarly, Ashley Montagu writes: “Natural selection . . . has been rather more operative in terms of co-operation than it has been in terms of what is generally understood by competition. . . . Natural selection through ‘competition’ may secure the immediate survival of certain types of ‘competitors,’ but the survivors would not long survive if they did not co-operate” (Darwin, Competition and Cooperation, pp. 70, 72).

  29. Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, pp. 74–75; emphasis in original.

  30. A revised version of W. C. Allee’s The Social Life of Animals.

  31. Montagu lists some fifty books and articles in Darwin, pp. 35–37.

  32. Marvin Bates, The Nature of Natural History, quoted in Montagu, ibid., p. 58. William Patten’s better known The Grand Strategy of Evolution summarized it as follows: “There is but one creative process common to all phases of evolution, inorganic, organic, mental, and social. That process is best described by the term cooperation, or mutual service” (p. 33). See also Roderic Gorney’s Human Agenda, esp. pp. 100–101, and Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell. Even on the genetic level, Patrick Bateson points out that “the perpetuation of each gene depends on the characteristics of the gene team” (“Cooperation and Competition,” p. 55). The relative importance of competition in ecological theory is being questioned, too (see, for example, Stephen Doig, “Ecology May Never Be the Same After Daniel Simberloff,” p. 17).

  33. W. C. Allee, Cooperation Among Animals, p. 16. He continues: “[The roots of] an unconscious kind of mutualism . . . are deep and well established and its expression grows to be so spontaneous and normal that we are likely to overlook or forget it” (p. 176).

  34. Richard Dawkins and Garrett Hardin are examples.

  35. A similar fallacy resides in sociobiologists’ arguments about altruism, which term is likewise used in two senses. See Gunther Stent, “You Can Take the Ethics Out of Altruism But You Can’t Take the Altruism Out of Ethics.” Marshall Sahlins, in The Use and Abuse of Biology, and Anthony Flew, in “From Is to Ought,” make essentially the same point about confusing two levels of meaning with respect to terms like “law of nature” and “natural selection.”

  36. John A. Wiens, “Competition or Peaceful Coexistence?” p. 34.

  37. For example, Sahlins, Montagu, and Gorney. Also, Elliot Aronson suspects that “Kropotkin’s work . . . has been largely ignored, perhaps because it did not fit in with the temper of the times or with the needs of those who were profiting from the industrial revolution” (p. 153). And Richard Hofstadter: “American society saw its own image in the tooth-and-claw version of natural selection, and . . . dominant groups were therefore able to dramatize this vision of competition as a thing good in itself. Ruthless business rivalry and unprincipled politics seemed to be justified by the survival philosophy” (p. 201).

  38. Quoted in Lewontin et al., p. 309, fn. 30. The sociobiologists continue to make vigorous use of this gambit. Slavery, love, and a good many more human institutions are said to be found in other species. Consider, for example, this excerpt from Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature: “The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. It is consistent with this trend that most of the pleasures of human sex constitute primary reinforcers to facilitate bonding. Love and sex do indeed go together” (pp. 146–47). Notice what he has done here: After describing a phenomenon called “bonding,” he suddenly substitutes the word “love.” Now he can proceed as if he had actually demonstrated that human love is identical to the bonding common to all animals.

  39. Montagu, Darwin, p. 72.

  40. Mark A. May, “A Research Note on Cooperative and Competitive Behavior,” p. 888.

  41. May and Doob cited in Emmy A. Pepitone, Children in Cooperation and Competition: Toward a Developmental Social Psychology, p. 14.

  42. Deutsch, Resolution of Conflict, p. 89.

  43. Thomas Tutko and William Bruns, Winning Is Everything and Other American Myths, p. 53.

  44. David Riesman, “Football in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion,” p. 252.

  45. Aronson, pp. 153, 206.

  46. Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, pp. 295–96.

  47. Susan Schiffer Stautberg, “The Rat Race Isn’t for Tots.” See also a New York Times article by Michael deCourcy Hinds: “‘There is as much pressure to get [children] into kindergarten as there will be to get them into law school’” (“Private Schools: The First Steps”). “Young professionals want the best: the best job, the best BMW, the best baby,” writes James Traub. “They know they have to compete for it” (“Goodbye, Dr. Spock,” p. 61).

  48. Deutsch, “Education and Distributive Justice,” p. 394. He continues: “If educational measurement is not mainly in the form of a contest, why are students often asked to reveal their knowledge and skills in carefully regulated test situations designed to be as uniform as possible in time, atmosphere, and conditions for all students? . . . A strange thing, this artificially induced scarcity of rewards: Its effects are probably quite opposite to its ostensible purpose, discouraging rather than encouraging the growth of educational merit” (ibid.).

  49. See Joan I. Roberts, Scene of the Battle: Group Behavior in the Urban Classrooms, p. 184.

  50. Peter L. and Brigitte Berger, Sociology: A Biographical Approach, p. 189. Terry Orlick similarly notes that children “are taught that winning is what counts, since they certainly do not begin feeling this way. Initially the child plays for fun, for the sheer enjoyment of the game, for stimulation and positive interaction with others. Winning is unimportant, irrelevant; fun is extremely important” (Winning Through Cooperation, p.133).

  51. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, p. 37.

  52. The work of New Zealanders N. B. and T. D. Graves is reported in Pepitone, p. 59. Nancy Chodorow also points to studies that have found less competitiveness among children raised in “more collective childrearing situations (the kibbutzim, China, Cuba)” (The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, p. 217).

  53. Ruben, Competing, pp. 66–67.

  54. Deutsch, Resolution of Conflict, pp. 30–31; see also p. 365.

  55. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, p. 28.

  56. Harold H. Kelley and Anthony}. Stahelski, “Social Interaction Basis of Cooperators’ and Competitors’ Beliefs About Others.” See also Alexander Mintz, “Non-adaptive Group Behavior.” Morton Deutsch similarly found that “it is easier to move from cooperation to competition than in the other direction” (Distributive Justice, p
. 271).

  57. Ibid. “Of course the competitive person has experienced cooperative relationships and situations. But the . . . behavior is attributed to the situation rather than to the persons” (p. 89).

  58. For example, Robyn M. Dawes et al., “Behavior, Communication, and Assumptions About Other People’s Behavior in a Commons Dilemma Situation”; and Lawrence A. Messé and John M. Sivacek, “Predictions of Others’ Responses in a Mixed-Motive Game: Self-Justification or False Consensus?”

  59. Gerald Sagotsky et al., “Learning to Cooperate.”

  60. Linden L. Nelson and Spencer Kagan, “Competition: The Star-Spangled Scramble,” p. 56. The study involved sixty pairs of ten-year-olds. There was no delay between presentation of the two games, as in Sagotsky’s study.

  61. Nina B. Korsh, “Effects of Preaching, Practice, and Helpful Evaluations on Third Graders’ Collaborative Work.”

  62. Harold B. Weingold and Ronald L. Webster, “Effects of Punishment on a Cooperative Behavior in Children.”

  63. Aronson, pp. 206–10.

  64. Morton Deutsch and Robert M. Krauss, “The Effect of Threat Upon Interpersonal Bargaining.”

  65. David N. Campbell, “On Being Number One: Competition in Education,” p. 145.

  66. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, pp. 179–80. The study was blind—that is, those recording the incidences of spontaneous cooperative behavior did not know in advance which group had been playing the cooperative games.

  67. Ibid., p. 177.

  68. David W. Johnson and Brenda Bryant, “Cooperation and Competition in the Classroom,” p. 177.

  69. Johnson and Johnson, “Motivational Processes in Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Learning Situations” (hereafter “Processes”) p. 31. Other studies have found that (1) sixth grade students believe cooperative grading is fairer than the traditional system of rewarding on the basis of individual achievement (Johnson and Johnson, “The Socialization and Achievement Crisis,” pp. 151–52); and (2) of four proposed ways to distribute rewards, college students who worked at various tasks in an experimental setting had the most negative reaction to a “winner-take-all” system. Once they worked cooperatively, in fact, many students came to prefer a system of distributing rewards equally among the participants (Deutsch, Distributive Justice, pp. 157–59).

  70. This is just what Emmy Pepitone and her colleagues discovered, p. 245.

  71. Donald Bruce Haines and W. J. McKeachie, “Cooperative Versus Competitive Discussion Methods in Teaching Introductory Psychology,” pp. 389–90.

  72. Piaget himself (in Moral Judgment of the Child) is quite clear that intellectual maturity can be defined in terms of the ability to cooperate—the child moves from egocentric to social activity—but I believe he confuses matters by blurring cooperation and competition. Interdependence is surely involved in both, as Deutsch explained, but Piaget, like many other theorists of play, does not acknowledge the possibility of cooperative activity that is devoid of competitive structure.

  73. See, for example, Carolyn W. Sherif, “The Social Context of Competition,” p. 22.

  74. Nelson and Kagan (p. 54) point this out, as does Charles G. McClintock (“Development of Social Motives in Anglo-American and Mexican-American Children”).

  75. See note 23 above.

  76. Cited in Rheingold and Hay, p. 99.

  77. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, p. 176.

  78. Millard C. Madsen, “Developmental and Cross-Cultural Differences in the Cooperative and Competitive Behavior of Young Children,” p. 369.

  79. Sagotsky et al., p. 1041.

  80. Beatrice B. and John W. M. Whiting, Children of Six Cultures, p. 64. The mean proportional score for the other five cultures was 9.2; for the American town, it was 5.5.

  81. Jeanne Humphrey Block, “Conceptions of Sex Role: Some Cross-Cultural and Longitudinal Perspectives.”

  82. Spencer Kagan and Millard C. Madsen, “Experimental Analyses of Cooperation and Competition of Anglo-American and Mexican Children” (hereafter “Experimental Analyses”), pp. 57, 53.

  83. Boyce Rensberger, “What Made Humans Human?”

  84. George Edgin Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values, p. 267.

  85. Marshall D. Sahlins, “The Origin of Society,” pp. 80, 82.

  86. See, for example, David Pilbeam, “An Idea We Could Live Without: The Naked Ape,” esp. pp. 118–20. James Yost’s work with the Waorani hunters is described in the NOVA program “Nomads of the Rainforest”: “The boys share the use of the blowgun. Competition is completely foreign to them. Spontaneous cooperation is the only way they know” (p. 6).

  87. Irving Goldman, “The Zuni Indians of New Mexico,” pp. 344–45.

  88. Ibid., p. 338.

  89. B. H. Quain, “The Iroquois,” p. 256.

  90. Irving Goldman, “The Bathonga of South Africa” (hereafter “Bathonga”), p. 380.

  91. Margaret Mead, Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples, p. 16.

  92. Anthony G. Miller and Ron Thomas, “Cooperation and Competition Among Blackfoot Indian and Urban Canadian Children.” The study involved ninety-six children, about eight years old.

  93. Ariella Shapira and Millard C. Madsen, “Cooperative and Competitive Behavior of Kibbutz and Urban Children in Israel.” The study involved eighty children, about eight years old.

  94. Shapira and Madsen, “Between- and Within-Group Cooperation and Competition Among Kibbutz and Nonkibbutz Children.” The study involved 320 children, ages eight to eleven.

  95. Robert L. and Ruth H. Munroe, “Cooperation and Competition Among East African and American Children.”

  96. Kagan and Madsen, “Experimental Analyses.” The study involved 160 children, ages seven to nine and ten to eleven.

  97. Kagan and Madsen, “Cooperation and Competition of Mexican, Mexican-American, and Anglo-American Children of Two Ages Under Four Instructional Sets” (hereafter “Four Instructional Sets”).

  98. Nelson and Kagan, “Competition,” p. 91.

  99. Kimball and Romaine Romney, The Mixtecans of Juxtlahuaca, Mexico, p. 21.

  100. George B. Leonard, “Winning Isn’t Everything. It’s Nothing,” p. 45.

  101. Orlick, Winning Through Cooperation, pp. 41–54, 223–35.

  102. Elizabeth A. Sommerlad and W. P. Bellingham, “Cooperation-Competition: A Comparison of Australian, European, and Aboriginal School Children.”

  103. Gerald Marwell and David R. Schmitt, Cooperation: An Experimental Analysis, pp. 170–72.

  104. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, pp. 154–55.

  105. William K. Cummings, Education and Equality in Japan, p. 127.

  106. Jack and Elizabeth Easley, Math Can Be Natural: Kitamaeno Priorities Introduced to American Teachers, paraphrased in Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind, p. 380. This, of course, is not to endorse all facets of Japanese pedagogy any more than the preceding expressed a blanket approval of the other cultures. At least one observer reports that Japanese schools tend to discourage questioning, autonomy, and individuation (Edward B. Fiske, “Japan’s Schools Stress Group and Discourage Individuality”). Cooperative learning, however, can surely coexist with these goals.

  107. Julian Baum, “Friendship No Longer Ranks Ahead of Winning for Chinese Olympians.” Terry Orlick, however, offers a very different account of Chinese athletes and their fans—one that suggests winning is far less important to them than to their American counterparts (Winning Through Cooperation, pp. 69–77).

  108. Susan L. Shirk, Competitive Comrades, p. 162.

  109. Nelson and Kagan, “Competition,” p. 90.

  110. Margaret Mead, p. 495.

  111. Gorney, Human Agenda, pp. 159–60.

  112. Gorney, “Cultural Determinants of Achievement, Aggression, and Psychological Distress.”

  113. Margaret Mead, p. 511.

  114. Ibid., pp. 481–82.

  115. Ibid., p. 463.

  116. William O. Johnson, “From Here
to 2000,” p. 443.

  117. Two psychoanalysts who have applied themselves to sports psychology are Arnold R. Beisser, in The Madness in Sports (particularly the chapter entitled “The Problem of Winning”), and Robert A. Moore, in Sports and Mental Health.

  118. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 58.

  119. Ibid., p. 59.

  120. Anna Freud, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, p. 150.

  121. Ian Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate, p. 20 and passim. This is a reference to the interdependent character of competitive interaction—which is also implicit in Piaget’s formulation.

  122. Gorney, Human Agenda, p. 472.

  123. Herbert Hendin, The Age of Sensation, p. 97.

  124. As with psychoanalysts, social psychologists generally do not explicitly argue in this manner that competition is unavoidable; social comparison theory instead is used by others to support their belief that this is the case. The theory itself was derived indirectly from the thought of George Herbert Mead (see especially Mind, Self, and Society) and articulated most clearly by Leon Festinger in his classic article, “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes.”

  125. Rainer Martens, “Competition: In Need of a Theory,” p. 13.

  126. Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory, p. 132.

  127. Jerome Kagan, The Nature of the Child, p. 273.

  128. Joseph Veroff, “Social Comparison and the Development of Achievement Motivation,” p. 55.

  129. Carl Rogers, for example, writes that healthy development is characterized by the individual’s coming to feel that the “locus of evaluation lies within himself” (On Becoming a Person, p. 119).

  130. Irving Goldman, “Bathonga,” p. 360.

  131. Harvey et al., pp. 176–77.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Spiro Agnew, “In Defense of Sport,” pp. 257–58. One does not,have to look very hard to find similar sentiments in other quarters. Sociologist Harry Edwards, for example, quotes a high school principal as saying, “If we had a country of individuals who didn’t value competitiveness, we would have chaos, anarchy, and zero productivity” (Sociology of Sport, p. 119).