No Contest (27 page)

This theory neatly explains why losers become aggressive, but it raises the question of why winners (or fans of winning teams) do so as well. In an experiment with five- and six-year-olds, Janice Nelson and her associates found that “success as well as failure in competition produced consistent increases in aggression, as compared with the effects of noncompetitive play,” although failure made the children more aggressive.
⁵⁷
Another study, which first involved watching an adult be aggressive, discovered that the boys who won a subsequent competition were
more
aggressive than those who failed.
⁵⁸
Such findings suggest two possibilities: (1) competition generates aggression as a result of something other than its capacity to frustrate participants, or (2) even winning is not enough to eradicate the frustrating elements of competition. The authors of the second study prefer the latter hypothesis: “Whether successful or not, competition is considered a frustrating experience because of the threat of defeat and the unpredictability of the outcome.”
⁵⁹
In any case, it is quite clear that the hostile encounter called competition—on the playing field and in other contexts, for both participants and spectators—leads us to become more aggressive.

 

RX: COOPERATION

 

Competition is the worst possible arrangement as far as relationship is concerned. There may be drawbacks to working or playing or learning independently, but at least this does not place us in the position of viewing each other as enemies. Happily, though, we do not have to settle for the lesser evil of isolation. There is a third approach—cooperation—which has a powerful positive effect on relationship. Chapter 3 showed that working together is more productive. Now I want to emphasize a somewhat less surprising but equally consequential finding: when we cooperate, we are inclined to like each other more.

Even in a mercilessly competitive society, there are pockets of cooperative activity—enough, at least, so that each of us knows what it is to work with others to paint a room, prepare a report, cook a meal. To remember such experiences is to know that cooperation encourages us to view our collaborators favorably; it is to understand how cooperation teaches us, more broadly, the value of relationship. Cooperation means that the success of each participant is linked to that of every other. This structure tends to lead to mutual assistance and support, which, in turn, predisposes cooperators to feel an affinity for one another. At the very least, cooperation offers an
opporunity
to interact positively (which independent effort does not and which competition actively discourages); at the most, it provides an irresistible
inducement
to do so.

There is by now an impressive pile of studies substantiating these conclusions, but their findings seem so predictable that I will review them only briefly. David and Roger Johnson conducted a precise statistical analysis of ninety-eight studies on this issue published between 1944 and 1982. Their collective finding:

 

Cooperative experiences promote more positive relationships among individuals from different ethnic backgrounds, between handicapped and nonhandicapped individuals, and more homogeneous individuals than do [the alternative arrangements:] cooperation with intergroup competition, interpersonal competition, and individualistic experiences.
⁶⁰

 

As of 1985, the Johnsons themselves had conducted thirty-seven studies of interpersonal attraction under different learning arrangements. Thirty-five of them clearly showed that cooperation promoted greater attraction, while the results were mixed in the other two.
⁶¹

“Interpersonal attraction” is a catchall phrase that stands for quite a number of positive effects. Among them:

•    E
NCOURAGEMENT
G
IVEN:
Research by Brenda Bryant discovered that children who worked cooperatively “more actively encouraged and supported the self-enhancement of others than children from a competitive or individualistic learning environment.”
⁶²

•    E
NCOURAGEMENT
R
ECEIVED:
Other studies have shown that students
perceive
such encouragement and support from their peers in a cooperative setup.
⁶³

•    S
ENSITIVITY:
Gillian King and Richard Sorrentino found more “sensitivity to the needs of others” displayed in cooperation; their experimental subjects also reported that cooperative situations were much more pleasant than competitive situations.
⁶⁴

•    O
THER
-O
RIENTATION:
Children can more readily move beyond a self-centered orientation and begin to take others into account once they are placed in a cooperative environment, reported Emmy Pepitone and her colleagues.
⁶⁵

•    P
ERSPECTIVE
-T
AKING:
Cooperation, as I noted earlier in this chapter, is by far the best way to promote perspective-taking. People tend to see things from the other person's point of view when they are working with, rather than against, each other.

•    C
OMMUNICATION
is improved through cooperation. Deutsch's classic experiment with undergraduates showed that when students worked cooperatively, “more ideas were verbalized, and members were more attentive to one another. . . . They had fewer difficulties in communicating with or understanding others.” (With competition, Deutsch adds, communication tends to be “unreliable and impoverished.”)
⁶⁶

•    T
RUST:
Even when individuals have unequal power (as represented in an experimental game), they tend to trust each other in a cooperative structure. Trust is virtually absent under competition.
⁶⁷

Some of the most exciting research in this field concerns the effect of cooperation on students who are different from one another. It says quite a bit if any two people will come to like each other as a result of having cooperated on something. But it says far more if the same thing happens with people of different abilities or ethnic backgrounds. Research from the 1940s and 1950s suggested that “interaction within a cooperative context [was] a major determinant of whether cross-ethnic contact produced positive attitudes and relationships,” and later work has confirmed this.
⁶⁸
Simply bringing together children from different backgrounds does not produce harmony, as a chorus of bitter voices never tires of pointing out. But instead of simply indicting desegregation (or, worse, abandoning it), it seems more sensible to investigate what happens to students once they are in the same classroom. Whereas competition creates an atmosphere of hostility and does nothing to overcome differences, cooperation builds bridges. Its capacity for encouraging positive regard is no less potent when the cooperators are from different backgrounds, as the studies show quite clearly.
⁶⁹
And this effect is not limited to class projects: once cooperative learning brings children together, they continue to enjoy spending time with each other. After the lessons are over, students in cooperative classrooms socialize more heterogeneously than those in competitive or independent learning situations.
⁷⁰
In all, cooperation points the way to what child development researcher Urie Bronfenbrenner once called a “curriculum of caring.”

Implicit in all of this is a truth that many people may find disconcerting. How we feel about other people is often put down, rather vaguely, to “chemistry”—not a subject for social science research, but a beguiling mystery to be wondered at by poets and songwriters. Even if we are willing to scrutinize patterns in our relationships, we tend to see them as a function of other people's behavior and personality. (We like people who are likable.) But the implication of what I have been reporting in this chapter is that our attitudes about others are largely dependent on the structure in which we interact. I do not mean to suggest that an individual's actions are irrelevant to how I regard her. Neither do I believe that science can (or should) eliminate all mystery from what happens between two people—or reduce the uniqueness of each relationship to generalizable laws. Still, there is no escaping the fact that the texture of our relationships depends to a significant degree on the context in which we come to know each other. I will look very different to someone for whom I am a rival than to someone for whom I am a partner. Of course, not all competitors will be lifelong enemies, just as not all cooperators will develop enduring friendships. But a predisposition toward hostility or attraction undeniably develops as a result of the structure under which we deal with one another. That is what the evidence—and, if we think about it, our own experience—demonstrates.

 

WE VS. THEY

 

The benefits of cooperation are so compelling that it seems even a competitive society must take notice. But how can such a society allow its members to taste the fruits of working together while still socializing them to keep the larger competitive framework? The answer is intragroup cooperation with intergroup competition. Work with
some
others, but do so in order to defeat everyone else. This is about as close as some of us ever get to genuine cooperation. I would argue that it represents a rather unsatisfying compromise—better than competition at every level but not as good as competition at no level. The conventional wisdom in a competitive culture, by contrast, is that intergroup competition heightens—or perhaps is even required for—cooperation within the group. Whatever is to be gained by cooperating depends on working to defeat a common enemy. Every “We” needs a “They.”

Is this true? Recall that when studies found performance was enhanced by intragroup cooperation, people asked whether this effect actually relied on intergroup competition. The answer was unequivocally no (
[>]
). Such competition either was irrelevant to the cooperation-generated productivity or actually diminished it. The same seems to be true here. Intergroup competition is not necessary for intragroup cooperation to draw people together. Robert Dunn and Morton Goldman set out to test this question with college students in 1966. They found, first, that intergroup competition led subjects to view those from other groups negatively, and, second, that intergroup competition was not helpful in developing feelings of acceptance within each group. Such rivalry, they concluded, “may not only be unnecessary, but may do social harm through the intergroup tensions that it arouses.”
⁷¹
The Johnsons, too, paid attention to this issue when they analyzed the results of scores of studies on interpersonal attraction. They found that subjects tended to like each other more where cooperation did
not
take place in the context of intergroup competition.
⁷²
Finally, a 1985 study confirmed that

 

intergroup cooperation promoted more positive cross-ethnic and crosssex relationships than did intergroup competition. These results dis-confirm the position that competition among groups leads to attraction among collaborators . . . and they provide some support for the position that the more pervasive the cooperation, the greater the interpersonal attraction.
⁷³

 

If these data seem surprising, it may be because we have confounded interpersonal attraction with group unity. The latter is associated with loyalty to the group as such, and often with uniformity among its members. Thus, the citizens of a nation will indeed wave their flags more vigorously when they have been persuaded that another nation poses a threat. This phenomenon is not at all what I have been discussing. Allegiance to a country or school or corporation does not necessarily promote sensitivity, trust, better perspective-taking, and so on among those in the group. Conversely, liking the individuals in my group does not mean I will reify and then glorify the group itself. Intergroup competition may be necessary for chauvinism, but not for relationship.

There is another reason that intergroup competition does not promote cooperation. Just as competition spreads from the workplace to the home, so it leaks from intergroup to intragroup level. This is partly the result of generalization of learning: it is not so easy to view some people as competitors, with all the attendant hostility, and then wipe away this orientation with respect to other people (those on the same team). The proof is in the furious competition for starting positions or higher salaries among athletes on the same team.
⁷⁴

This pervasive phenomenon does not mean that competition is an irrepressible part of human nature. It means that the most effective way to set up cooperation does not involve tacking on competition at another level. Far better is cooperation at both the intergroup and intragroup levels. When hostility mounted during the Robbers' Cave experiment, Sherif at first tried to unite the two teams by having them combine forces to beat a team from another camp. It didn't work.

 

The short-term effects of this common enemy were to induce cooperation for “our camp” to beat theirs. However, when the common enemy was gone, the two rivals quickly retreated to their own in-groups, still unwilling to cooperate in other activities across group lines. Further, had we continued the “common enemy” approach, we would have ended by merely enlarging the scope of the generalized effects of win-lose competition that had already occurred within our camp. In effect, we would have had a bigger war.
⁷⁵

 

Sherif finally did end the vicious rivalry between Rattlers and Eagles by setting up “superordinate goals” for the boys to meet. These were tasks, such as pulling a truck up a hill or fixing the water supply system, in which the two groups had to cooperate—but without competing against anyone else.