No Contest (30 page)

When we dismiss someone as a “loser”—one of our most scathing epithets—we are underscoring the importance of winning. It is not seen as important that we win with restraint or in accordance with ethical principles—just that we win. An athlete who plays dirty develops a reputation as someone to be reckoned with, someone impressive and fearsome; he is “bad” or “tough” in the admiring sense that children use these words. The concrete advantages of such a style also are clear: What's a 15-yard penalty if you can put the other team's receiver out for the game? No one gets kept on the team for being a good sport. The more substantial penalties are handed out for losing. Moreover, as Tutko and Bruns observe, “the American culture has built so much guilt into losing that the person who tries to make a healthy adjustment to it—like cracking jokes in the midst of a losing streak—is thought to be a lousy competitor, if not a little crazy.”
²⁴
Clearly it is better to be thought overzealous than a lousy competitor.

The pressure to win at all costs, again, is not limited to athletics. Unethical campaign practices are partly the result of our society's priorities, as sociologist Amitai Etzioni explained:

 

Truth to be told, the Watergate gang is but an extreme manifestation of a much deeper and more encompassing American malaise, the emphasis on success and frequent disregard for the nature of the means it takes to achieve it. Not only high level administration officials, but many Americans as well, seem to have accepted the late football coach Vince Lombardi's motto, “Winning is not the most important thing, it's the
only
thing.” Thus, the executives of ITT who sought to overthrow the government of Chile to protect their goodies, the Mafia [chieftains] who push heroin, the recording company executives who bribe their records onto the top-40 list, and the citizens who shrug off corruption in the local town hall as “that's the way the cookie crumbles,” all share the same unwholesome attitude. True, the Watergate boys have broken all known American precedents in their violation of fair play, but they are unique chiefly in the magnitude of their crime—not in the basic orientation that underlies it.
²⁵

 

The tendency to shrug off political corruption as expected and unexceptional is not only distressing but very dangerous—rather like the refusal to differentiate among health hazards on the grounds that “everything is bad for you.” The effect is that politicians know that the reaction to their improprieties, if discovered, probably will not outweigh the fruits of victory. By the same token, the lawyer who resorts to gutter tactics is well aware that his or her win/loss record is what really matters. Marvin Frankel put it this way: “In a system that so values winning and deplores losing, where lawyers are trained to fight for, not to judge their clients, where we learn as advocates not to ‘know' inconvenient things, moral elegance is not to be expected.”
²⁶
Such social pressures, I want to reiterate, merely reinforce the inherent qualities of competition. Our approval of winning at all costs is the secondary inducement to cheat; the primary inducement is the nature of competition itself. It is true that contests without cheating or violence can occur if we successfully introduce considerations that are external to the impetus to win. Such contests seem unobjectionable, however, precisely because the element of competition has been diluted. To point to a morally exemplary lawsuit or an examination where the honors system is respected is not to refute the basic point here. The less competitive a given activity, the less likelihood, all things being equal, of “abuses.” This is consistent with the arguments offered in earlier chapters of this book: the higher the concentration of competition in any interaction, the less likely it is to be enjoyable and the more likely it is to be destructive to our self-esteem, our relationships, our standards of fairness.

8

 

I wish it could have been a tie.

—Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn),
after defeating her husband in court
in
Adam's Rib

 

Competitive cultures train their members to compete, but the training is not the same for everyone. It is affected by whether one lives downtown or in the country, whether one is born into wealth or poverty. Perhaps the single most important variable—one I have not yet mentioned—is gender. The lessons on when and how to compete, and on how to regard the whole enterprise of competition, are significantly different for boys and girls. Attitudes and behaviors remain different for men and women, with important consequences for the society as a whole.

The general rule is that American males are simply trained to win. The object, a boy soon gathers, is not to be liked but to be envied, not to reflect but to act, not to be part of a group but to distinguish himself from the others in that group. From her work with children, Carole Ames found that “the consequences of failing in competitive situations appear to have been more ego threatening for males than females.”
¹
Being number one is an imperative for boys, so a good deal is invested in whether one makes it.

There has been other research on sex differences. Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin reviewed a number of studies conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, concluding that “boys tend to be more competitive, but the behavior is evidently subject to situational and cultural variations to a considerable degree.”
²
In 1979, two researchers surveyed the attitudes of more than twenty-four hundred students from grades two through twelve. At all ages, they discovered, boys were more enthusiastic about competition than girls and more likely to prefer it. Boys were also less enthusiastic about, and less likely to prefer, cooperation.
³

Recent research has confirmed that this disparity does not disappear when we grow up
⁴
—which, of course, is hardly news to most of us. The male competitive orientation may manifest itself as blatantly as it did during childhood, as little boys wrestling after school grow into men who sabotage rivals for the vice presidency or vie for an attractive woman or explode in infantile fury on the squash court. Then again, the urge may be tempered, sublimated, rechanneled. Even when grown men eye each other on the street, says one writer, what flashes through their minds is:

 

Can I take this guy, or not? . . . Maybe it isn't so physical. Questions like, “Am I smarter than this guy?” and “If we start talking about jobs, will mine sound more impressive?” are part of the same response. So is “Am I better looking (or thinner, or funnier)?” It's the competitive instinct reduced to its pettiest essence, but there it is. Boys are taught to win. If winning involves beating some other boy who wants to win just as badly, then you've got to take him or suffer the consequences.
⁵

 

This observation appeared in the “About Men” column of the
New York Times Magazine,
a forum for male rumination. The very frequency with which competition appears as a theme in these essays is noteworthy. Here, for example, is a column written by one of the magazine's editors:

 

Sports is where the boy child of our culture learns what's expected of him when he grows up: winning. Some of us may seem to outgrow any need to heave our middle-aged carcasses around a softball diamond or a tennis court, but we have an unconscious inner core where that painfully vivid childhood lesson is ever fresh. It emerges when we put down our kids, when we undercut our colleagues—and when we dream.
⁶

 

It emerges also in the way men talk, often arguing even when there is no substantial disagreement, just for the chance to come out ahead. For men, the very act of speaking is often an opportunity to establish “who
really
is best, stronger, smarter, or, ultimately, more powerful.”
⁷
So much for men. The training they receive and the character structure it builds are depressingly straightforward. Competition appears in full-strength concentrate. On the other hand, some girls are raised to compete while others are not. Mixed messages are common, creating profoundly ambivalent feelings toward competition. Finally, attitudes about the desirability of competing for women are in flux today. The question for females is, in short, far more complex—more interesting intellectually, more urgent politically. This is why I have devoted a chapter to the subject of women and competition without a corresponding chapter about men.

One of the most influential ways of accounting for women's greater reluctance to compete was devised by Matina Horner in the 1960s. Psychologists who study motivation have long talked about “the motive to approach success” and “the motive to avoid failure,” two constructs used to predict behavior and explain levels of accomplishment. In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, Horner proposed a new motive: “fear of success” (also known as “the motive to avoid success”). The idea was created to explain differences between the sexes: women are brought up to regard pursuit of achievement as unfeminine and thus to become anxious throughout life at the prospect of doing well. Presumably, then, they exhibit more fear of success. Horner tested this by asking undergraduates to write a story about a fictitious student (of the same sex as the subject) who was said to be “at the top of her (his) medical school class.” She reported that two thirds of the women, as compared to only about 9 percent of the men, told stories that contained fear of success imagery. Since the basis of all projective testing is that such stories reflect the psychological state of the storyteller, the women here were understood to be saying that they hold themselves back because they are afraid of success.
⁸

Horner's work received considerable attention, and the catch phrase “fear of success” quickly became part of the language. Unfortunately, it has not stood up well under careful scrutiny and further study. The concept's status as an enduring trait has been questioned, and Horner's technique for measuring it (on which the findings of differences between men and women depend) has seemed dubious to many scholars. “The projective measure of fear of success is ambiguous, has low reliability, and lacks predictive validity,” as two psychologists put it.
⁹
What Horner scored as fear of success in the stories told by her subjects might have been affected by the testing situation or the occupation she used (medicine) or the sex of the person being written about rather than the sex of the subject. In any case, attempts to replicate her findings have rarely succeeded. Sex-based differences in fear of success imagery usually have been slight, and many studies have found no difference at all—or even more fear among men.
¹⁰
Part of the problem may be that the disparity Horner discovered was rooted not in underlying differences between the sexes but in social factors. As the latter have shifted, women's and men's attitudes toward success have converged.
¹¹

The real problem with Horner's “fear of success” construct, though—or at least the problem with how her data have been interpreted—is the tendency to confound success with competition. As I tried to show in chapter 3, these two are not at all the same thing; in fact, competitiveness can be an impediment to success. Horner quite explicitly stated that she “referfs] to this disposition to become anxious in competitive achievement situations as the motive to avoid success.”
¹²
Similarly, a later study that corroborated Horner's findings assumed that anyone disagreeing with such statements as “I am happy only when I am doing better than others” or “The rewards of a successful competition are greater than those received from cooperation” was exhibiting fear of success.
¹³
This raises the possibility that women are backing away from the prospect of having to beat other people, not from success itself.

Psychologist Georgia Sassen made just this point in a 1980 article, noting that when fear of success tests do not limit themselves to competitive success, there is no difference between the sexes.
¹⁴
Then she went a step further. At about the same time Robert Helmreich and his associates were taking the long overdue step of breaking down success into its constituent parts (or what are assumed to be its parts)—and discovering that the most competitive professionals are actually among the
least
successful (see
[>]
)—Sassen did something similar. She devised a way to measure how much someone's idea of success is based on competition, a scale she called the competitiveness-of-success concept (COSC). Sure enough, while there seemed to be no difference between the sexes on fear of success, per se, men's COSC was higher than women's. Sassen concluded that “the sex difference in earlier work on fear of success was actually a sex difference in how people define success for themselves. . . . Men define success competitively, as Horner [and] those who replicated Horner's research . . . did.”
¹⁵

So what happens when women are allowed to work at a task in a noncompetitive situation? Horner herself provided the answer: “In the absence of interpersonal competition and its aggressive overtones, whereby the tendency to avoid success is minimally, if at all, aroused, these women [who are high in fear of success] will perform efficiently.”
¹⁶
Several years later, when Maccoby and Jacklin reviewed the literature on the subject, they found that: “Boys need to be challenged by appeals to ego or competitive motivations to bring their achievement up to the level of girls'. Boys' achievement motivation does appear to be more responsive to competitive arousal than girls', but this does not imply a generally higher level.”
¹⁷