No Contest (10 page)

Since “group performance in problem solving is superior to even the individual work of the most expert group members,”
²⁷
it should not be surprising that students learn better when they cooperate. But the last technique—having students help one another—raises the question of whether students with lower ability are being helped at the expense of those with higher ability. Is this true? Knowledge, happily, is not a zero-sum product. Anyone who has taught or tutored knows that doing so not only reinforces one's own knowledge but often pulls one to a more sophisticated understanding of the material. The cliché about teachers' learning as much as their pupils is quite true, and the tutoring that takes place in a cooperative classroom actually benefits both the helper and the helped more than a competitive or independent study arrangement.

The evidence substantiates this view. As the Johnsons conclude:

 

There can be little doubt that the low and medium ability students especially benefit from working collaboratively with peers from the full range of ability differences. There is also evidence that high ability students are better off academically when they collaborate with medium and low ability peers than when they work alone; at the worst . . . [they] are not hurt.
²⁸

 

Returning to the question in 1985, the Johnsons cited three studies that found gifted students are helped by such collaboration, one that found no difference, and none that found they were disadvantaged.
²⁹
A study of 75 Midwestern second graders published that same year also reported that “high-, medium-, and low-achieving students all academically benefited from participation in heterogeneous cooperative learning groups.”
³⁰
Moreover, earlier research discovered that tutoring occurred
spontaneously
when the consequences for learning were shared by the group—and that this “produced no long-term complaints from the participants in this experiment.” Once again, “even the gifted [benefited,] possibly more than they would have under individual consequences.”
³¹
(The advantages of a cooperative structure in education, incidentally, extend beyond mere performance; chapter 6 will consider the interpersonal consequences of cooperation and competition.)

Most of these studies assess performance in terms of learning, with the schoolroom as the prototype if not the actual setting. But what of the rest of the world? Don't competitive conditions—or personal competitiveness—lead to better performance?

Research on productivity and competition in traditional work settings has been nowhere near as plentiful as the classroom data. The findings, however, are remarkably consistent with those on learning. One early study, which has become something of a classic in sociological investigation, was conducted by Peter Blau in 1954. Blau compared two groups of interviewers in an employment agency. In one, there was fierce competition to fill job openings. The other group worked cooperatively. Members of the first group, who were personally ambitious and extremely concerned about productivity, hoarded job notifications rather than posting them so everyone could see them, as they were supposed to do. This practice eventually was used defensively and so became self-perpetuating. Members of the second group, by contrast, told each other about vacancies. And it was this second group that ended up filling significantly more jobs—the clear index of performance.
³²

A quarter century later, Robert L. Helmreich of the University of Texas and his colleagues decided to investigate the relationship between achievement, on the one hand, and such traits as the orientation toward work, mastery (preference for challenging tasks), and competitiveness, on the other. A sample of 103 male Ph.D. scientists were rated on these three factors based on a questionnaire. Achievement, meanwhile, was defined in terms of the number of times their work was cited by colleagues. The result was that “the most citations were obtained by those high on the Work and Mastery but low on the Competitiveness scale.”

This startled Helmreich, who did not expect that competitiveness would have a deleterious effect. Could the result be a fluke? He conducted another study, this one involving academic psychologists. The result was the same. He did two more studies, one involving male businessmen, measuring achievement by their salaries, and the other with 1300 male and female undergraduates, using grade point average as the attainment criterion. In both cases he again found a significant negative correlation between competitiveness and achievement.
³³
Of the four studies, the one involving businessmen was particularly “exciting” to him because “the stereotype of the very successful businessman is of someone who is . . . highly competitive”—a stereotype called into serious question by these findings.
³⁴
In fact, as he and his colleague Janet Spence later observed, the data “dramatically refute the contention that competitiveness is vital to a successful business career.”
³⁵

But Helmreich did not stop there. As of 1985, he had conducted three more studies. The first compared the standardized achievement tests of fifth- and sixth-graders to their competitiveness. They were negatively related.
³⁶
The second examined the relationship between performance of airline pilots and competitiveness. The relationship between the latter and superior performance was negative.
³⁷
The third looked at airline reservation agents and again found a negative correlation between performance and competitiveness.
³⁸
Seven different studies, then, with vastly different populations and measures of success, have all determined that intentional competition is associated with lower performance.

Helmreich's research is particularly important because it does not rely on a compound personality measure such as the “motive for success.” Rather, it teases out competitiveness from the other components of this variable. Before this was done, researchers simply assumed that all of these components were associated with better performance. Now it appears that competitiveness in particular is not. Other researchers who have used a comparable methodology have found the same thing. In the German study of fourth graders mentioned earlier, just as in Helmreich's, competitive students did not get better grades. And psychologist Georgia Sassen, in the course of looking for differences between male and female students, also found a slight negative relationship between competitiveness and achievement.
³⁹

Consider the question of artistic creativity. The little research that has been done suggests that competition is just as unhelpful here as it is in promoting creative problem-solving. In one study, seven- to eleven-year-old girls were asked to make “silly” collages, some competing for prizes and some not. Seven artists then independently rated their works on each of 23 dimensions. The result: “Those children who competed for prizes made collages that were significantly less creative than those made by children in the control group.” Children in the competitive condition produced works thought to be less spontaneous, less complex, and less varied.
⁴⁰
In the long run, contests do not promote excellence among performing artists, either. Here is critic Will Crutchfield on the subject of piano competitions: “The emotional stamina to tough it out through round after round, as the competition winds on and the stakes rise, does not necessarily go along with the emotional sensitivity to make five minutes worth of truly remarkable Chopin.”
⁴¹
In a win/lose framework, success comes to those whose temperaments are best suited for competition. This is not at all the same thing as artistic talent, and it may well pull in the opposite direction.

Across many fields, the assumption that competition promotes excellence has become increasingly doubtful. Consider journalism, a profession that, while no more competitive than many others, is worth exploring by virtue of its unusual visibility to outsiders. The frantic race for news generates terrific levels of anxiety (and the attendant psychological symptoms) on the part of journalists.
⁴²
Can we at least point to better reporting as a result of this competition? Setting reporters against one another in a battle for space on the front page or the first block of a television news show probably
lowers
the quality of journalism in the long run, and so, too, does the contest among news organizations for subscriptions or ratings. The latter is more likely to take the form of sensationalism, arresting graphics, or promotional games. A thorough study of science news reporting, which included interviews with 27 leading science reporters, led Jay Winsten to conclude as follows:

 

The most striking finding which emerged from the interviews is the dominant distorting influence of the “competitive force” in journalism.

. . . Science reporters, based at preeminent publications, stated that competition for prominent display of their stories creates a strong motivation to distort their coverage.
⁴³

 

Having to compete for space creates an incentive not for accurate reporting but for “hyping” a story—that is, exaggerating its significance. This tendency, Winsten adds, is complemented by the competition for publicity among scientists, hospitals, and universities; the combination practically assures that reporting will be distorted.
⁴⁴

In any sort of journalism, the ordinary pressures of having to work on deadline are exacerbated by the pressure to get a story on the air seconds before the competition or to get a fact that another newspaper does not have. The result is that the public gets less information over the long run than they would have access to if the various news organizations worked together. Moreover, news stories are more likely to be inaccurate and even irresponsible as a result of competition. When a jet was hijacked by Shiite Moslems in 1985, one observer blamed the “distorted and excessive coverage of terrorist incidents” on “the highly competitive nature of network television.”
⁴⁵
A second critic independently came to the same conclusion, noting that “too many decisions are made on the basis of beating the competition rather than deciding how to act responsibly.”
⁴⁶
The structure of competitive journalism creates a situation in which a professional or ethical inclination to forgo coverage—or at least to pause in order to consider the implications of running a story (or to double-check the facts)—is invariably overridden by the fear that one's rival will get the scoop. Such competitive pressures ultimately benefit no one, least of all the public. Working against, rather than with, colleagues tends to be more destructive than productive. This corroborates the bulk of evidence on the topic—evidence that requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the usefulness of competition.

 

EXPLAINING COMPETITION'S FAILURE

 

How can we make sense of the failure of competition to produce superior performance? Most of the studies reviewed here offer at best a couple of sentences in the way of explanation for their findings. Other writers have addressed the problem, but no one has yet collected these conjectures and sorted them out. That will be the task of this section.

The simplest way to understand why competition generally does not promote excellence is to realize that
trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things
. Here sits a child in class, waving his arm wildly to attract the teacher's attention, crying, “Oooh! Oooh! Pick me!” The child is finally recognized but then seems befuddled. “Um, what was the question again?” he finally asks. His mind is on beating his classmates, not on the subject matter. The fact that there is a difference between the two goes a long way toward explaining why competition may actually make us less successful. At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that excellence and victory are conceptually distinct. Now I want to add that the two are
experienced
as different. One can attend either to the task at hand or to the enterprise of triumphing over someone else—and the latter often is at the expense of the former.

It is true, of course, that the relative quality of performance is what determines who wins in a competition, but this does not mean that competition makes for better performance. This is partly because those who believe they will lose may see little point in trying hard. The same is true for those who feel sure of winning.
⁴⁷
But even where there is enough uncertainty involved to avoid these problems, the fact remains that attending to the quest for triumph, to victory as such, to who is ahead at the moment, actually distracts one from the pure focus on what one is doing. Helmreich proposes this as one explanation for his surprising discovery that competition is counterproductive in the real world: “Competitive individuals might . . . focus so heavily on outshining others and putting themselves forward that they lose track of the scientific issues and produce research that is more superficial and less sustained in direction.”
⁴⁸
And, more succinctly: “They may become so preoccupied with winning . . . that they become distracted from the task at hand.”
⁴⁹

Let us see how this distinction plays itself out in different fields. I have already noted, in the case of piano competitions, that artistic excellence is not promoted by making performing artists compete. This is true for the same reason that anyone who wants to run for president may,
ipso facto,
be a bad choice for the job: those who enjoy—and possess the skills necessary for—a competitive campaign may not be the kind of people we want running the country. (It is theoretically possible for one person to be both a good leader and a good campaigner, but these two talents are quite different and would coincide only by accident.) We find the same phenomenon even in sports, as philosopher John McMurty explains: