No Contest (2 page)

***

Let us begin with a more precise formulation of the topic. I think it is useful to distinguish between what might be called
structural competition
and
intentional competition
. The former refers to a situation; the latter, to an attitude. Whereas structural competition has to do with the win/lose framework, which is external, intentional competition is internal; it concerns the desire on the part of an individual to he number one.

To say that an activity is structurally competitive is to say that it is characterized by what I will call
mutually exclusive goal attainment
(“MEGA,” for short). This means, very simply, that my success requires your failure. Our fates are negatively linked. If one of us must lose exactly as much as the other wins, as in poker, then we are talking about a “zero-sum game.” But in any MEGA arrangement, two or more individuals are trying to achieve a goal that cannot be achieved by all of them. This is the essence of competition, as several social scientists have observed.
⁹

The same phenomenon sometimes has been described as a situation of scarcity. This does not explain competition but simply restates if. If I must try to defeat you in order to get what I want, then what I want is scarce by definition. We need to be careful not to confuse this sort of scarcity with the kind that refers to an objective shortage of some commodity. It is possible, of course, for two hungry people to compete for a single bowl of stew. But in most contests, the goal is simply a prized status. Structural competition usually involves the comparison of several individuals in such a way that only one of them can be the best. The competition itself sets the goal, which is to win; scarcity is thereby created out of nothing.

Structural competitions can be distinguished according to several criteria. Competitions vary, for instance, with respect to how many winners there will be. Not everyone who applies for admission to a given college will be accepted, but my acceptance does not necessarily preclude yours (although it will make it somewhat less likely). On the other hand, only one woman in a bathing suit will be crowned Miss America each year, and if Miss Montana wins, Miss New Jersey cannot. In both of these competitions, notice that winning is the result of someone's subjective judgment. In other cases, such as arm wrestling, pre-established and reasonably straightforward criteria determine who wins.

Beauty contests and college admissions also share another feature: neither requires any direct interaction among the contestants. The success of one simply rules out or reduces the chances for success of another. There is a stronger version of structural competition in which one contestant must
make
the other(s) fail in order to succeed himself. War is one example. Tennis is another. Whereas two bowlers competing for a trophy take turns doing the same thing and do not interfere with each other, two tennis players actively work at defeating each other. Which of these postures is in evidence depends on the rules of the game, the type of structural competition that is involved.

Intentional competition is much easier to define—although its nuances are quite complex indeed, as we shall see later. Here we are simply talking about an individual's competitiveness, his or her proclivity for besting others. This can take place in the absence of structural competition, as all of us have observed: someone may arrive at a party and be concerned to prove he is the most intelligent or attractive person in the room even though no prizes are offered and no one else has given any thought to the matter. The psychoanalyst Karen Horney described as neurotic someone who “constantly measures himself against others, even in situations which do not call for it.”
¹⁰

The reverse situation—structural competition without intentional competition—is also possible. You may be concerned simply to do the best you can (without any special interest in being better than others), yet find yourself in a situation where this entails competing. Here it is the structure rather than your intention that defines success as victory. Perhaps you are even averse to competing but find yourself unable to avoid it—an unhappy and stressful state of affairs known to many of us. The most extreme case of structural competition without intentional competition is a circumstance in which individuals are ranked and rewarded without even being aware of it. Students may be sorted on the basis of their grades even if they are not trying to defeat each other. (The distinction between the two varieties of competition is especially useful in allowing us to make sense of such a scenario.)

Finally, let us take note of the rather obvious fact that competition can exist among individuals or among groups. The latter does not rule out the former: even as two corporations or nations or basketball teams are competing with each other, it is possible that the people within these groups can be vying for money or status. Competition among groups is known as
intergroup
competition, while competition among individuals within a group is called
intragroup
competition. These distinctions will prove important in later chapters.

***

Competition is not the only way to organize a classroom or a workplace. This is hardly a controversial observation, but because we have come to take competition for granted, we rarely think about alternatives. In this book, following the lead of most social psychologists, I will be considering three ways of achieving one's goals:
competitively,
which means working against others;
cooperatively,
which means working with others; and
independently,
which means working without regard to others. Although we sometimes speak of an individual or a culture as being both competitive and individualistic, it is important to realize that they are not the same. There is a difference between allowing one person to succeed only if someone else does not, on the one hand, and allowing that person to succeed irrespective of the other's success or failure, on the other. Your success and mine are related in both competition and cooperation (though in opposite ways); they are unrelated if we work independently.

We sometimes assume that working toward a goal and setting standards for oneself can take place only if we compete against others. This is simply false. One can both accomplish a task and measure one's progress in the absence of competition. A weightlifter may try to press ten pounds more than he did yesterday, for example. This is sometimes referred to as “competing with oneself,” which seems to me a rather unhelpful and even misleading phrase. A comparison of performance with one's own previous record or with objective standards is in no way an instance of competition and it should not be confused with it.
Competition
is fundamentally an interactive word, like
kissing,
and it stretches the term beyond usefulness to speak of competing with oneself. Moreover, such sloppy usage is sometimes employed in order to argue that competition is either inevitable or benign: since nobody loses when you try to beat your own best time, and since this is a kind of competition, then competition is really not so bad. This, of course, is just a semantic trick rather than a substantive defense of competition.

The third alternative, cooperation, will play a more important role in the pages that follow. The word refers to an arrangement that is not merely noncompetitive but requires us to work together in order to achieve our goals. Structural cooperation means that we have to coordinate our efforts because I can succeed only if you succeed, and vice versa. Reward is based on collective performance. Thus, a cooperative classroom is not simply one in which students sit together or talk with each other or even share materials. It means that successful completion of a task depends on each student and therefore that each has an incentive to want the other(s) to succeed.

When we think about cooperation at all, we tend to associate the concept with fuzzy-minded idealism or, at best, to see it as workable only in a very small number of situations. This may result from confusing cooperation with altruism. It is not at all true that competition is more successful because it relies on the tendency to “look out for number one” while cooperation assumes that we primarily want to help each other. Structural cooperation defies the usual egoism/altruism dichotomy. It sets things up so that by helping you I am helping myself at the same time. Even if my motive initially may have been selfish, our fates now are linked. We sink or swim together. Cooperation is a shrewd and highly successful strategy—a pragmatic choice that gets things done at work and at school even more effectively than competition does (as I will show in chapter 3) and can serve as a basis for creating challenging and enjoyable games that do not require us to compete against one another (as I will show in chapter 4). There is also good evidence that cooperation is more conducive to psychological health and to liking one another.

Even in a competitive culture there are aspects of cooperative and independent work. In fact, a single day at the office can include all three models. The most common mix consists of intragroup cooperation and intergroup competition: working with others in a group in order to defeat other groups. Football players cooperate in order to win and employees pull together in order that their company can earn higher profits than another company. It should be clear, however, that these orientations do not appear with the same frequency. Notice how often cooperation in our society is in the service of competition—and how often we must compete without being able to cooperate at all. As Robert Bellah and his colleagues put it, “The world of individualistic competition is experienced every day; the world of harmonious unanimity is fully realized only in sporadic flashes of togetherness, glimpses of what might be if only people would cooperate and their purposes reinforce, rather than undercut, one another.”
¹¹

***

That most of us consistently fail to consider the alternatives to competition is a testament to the effectiveness of our socialization. We have been trained not only to compete but to believe in competition. If we are asked about it, we unthinkingly repeat what we have been told. Unfortunately, the case for competition, as most of us have learned it, does not stand up under close scrutiny. It is a case that relies on rhetorical gambits, such as the insinuation that people who oppose competition are simply afraid of it, or on a lack of conceptual precision, such as the confusion of competition with conflict or with success. It is a case that sometimes misrepresents itself, such as by disguising the impulse to compete as a simple need to survive. Long ago, Bertrand Russell pointed out that what is often meant by “the struggle for life is really the [competitive] struggle for success. What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.”
¹²

Most of all, the case for competition is based on a great deal of misinformation. Specifically, it has been constructed on four central myths, and these myths, in the order of their popularity, form the basis of the next four chapters. The first myth is that competition is an unavoidable fact of life, part of “human nature.” Although this assumption is made casually (and without evidence), it demands a considered response; if it were true, arguments about competition's desirability would be beside the point since there is nothing we can do about our nature. The second myth is that competition motivates us to do our best—or, in stronger form, that we would cease being productive if we did not compete. This assumption is invoked to explain everything from grades to capitalism. Third, it is sometimes asserted that contests provide the best, if not the only, way to have a good time. All the joys of play are said to hinge on competitive games. The last myth is that competition builds character, that it is good for self-confidence. This claim is not heard quite so often as the others—probably because it contradicts not only empirical evidence but our own experience of the psychological impact of competition.

I mean to refute each of these myths by looking at all the arenas of human life where competition is present and by reviewing the relevant evidence from such diverse fields as education, social psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, leisure studies, evolutionary biology, and cultural anthropology. Contributions from philosophy and literature will be included for good measure. Investigating a topic like competition really seems to require this kind of interdisciplinary approach; the territorial inclinations of most scholars have often limited their effectiveness at exploring this and other important questions. These questions sprawl rudely across the boundaries that divide academic specialties.

Beginning with a definition of terms, as I have done, is fairly standard. But in this case, being clear about what competition means not only helps to keep the issue in sharper focus; it actually forms the basis of a critique. Strip away all the assumptions about what competition is supposed to do, all the claims in its behalf that we accept and repeat reflexively. What you have left is the essence of the concept: mutually exclusive goal attainment (MEGA). One person succeeds only if another does not. From this uncluttered perspective, it seems clear right away that something is drastically wrong with such an arrangement. How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose—and fearing that they will make us lose? Can this sort of struggle really be the best way to have a good time? What happens to our self-esteem when it becomes dependent on how much better we do than the next person? Most striking of all is the impact of this arrangement on human relationship: a structural incentive to see other people Jose cannot help but drive a wedge between us and invite hostility.

Again, all of these conclusions seem to flow from the very nature of competition. As it happens, they also are corroborated by the evidence—what we see around us and what scores of studies have been finding. One may not be inclined to consider this evidence, though, until the elemental question has been asked: What do we
mean
when we speak of competing?