No Contest (33 page)

***

I argued in chapter 5 that intentional competition could be understood in terms of self-esteem needs: we try to beat others in an effort to prove our own worth. Ultimately this strategy reveals itself as futile, since making our self-esteem contingent on winning means that it will always be in doubt. The more we compete, the more we
need
to compete.

Escaping this trap ultimately means finding more successful ways of securing our self-esteem: building an unconditional sense of trust in ourselves that will make it unnecessary to keep demonstrating our superiority. The better I feel about myself, the less I will need to make you lose. Carl Rogers emphasized that the experience of being accepted by others permits us to accept ourselves. Intuitively this seems more promising than trying to triumph over others. Given the unique dimensions of these issues for each person, however, I would not presume to offer a recipe for setting this complex process into motion. All I can reasonably do here is to call attention to the connection between intentional competition and self-esteem. Overcoming the former means in some respect concerning oneself with the latter.

Self-esteem is not an all-or-nothing affair, of course. Those who are least secure about themselves may require the most confirmation of their talents (and, ultimately, of their goodness). But all of us want io check how we are doing and reassure ourselves that we are competent. We are accustomed to doing so by ranking ourselves—to the point that where we stand (in relation to others) defines who we are. Because of this, a critic should have something with which to replace comparison if he is going to urge us to move beyond it. If we have come to be dependent on ranking for our very identities, we cannot very well expect to adjust instantly to its absence. Happily, as I pointed out in an earlier chapter, comparing oneself to others is not the only way to measure our progress. We can look instead to our own past performance or to some absolute standard to see how well we are doing. (Content with swimming a few more laps than I did last week, I will not feel compelled to find out how many laps the person in the next lane has completed.)
^*

If we are obliged to participate in structural competition, we can still work to reduce personal competitiveness. At the very least, we can shift to what I have called “process competition” by directing attention away from the results of an activity. If we are playing a competitive game, we ought not to keep score. If it will be obvious who wins, we should at least avoid awarding any prizes or making a fuss over the victor. By minimizing the significance of winning, we simultaneously soften the blow of losing. Whenever we take part in a contest, we can try to nest it in fellowship: by making a special effort to fortify the bonds between competitors, the destructive effects of having to work against each other can be eased a bit. Friendly gestures to rivals will be reciprocated more often than one might imagine; our opponents probably feel as isolated and trapped by the structure as we do. At the very least, such pleasantness can moderate the hostility that is generated by competing for the same position or prize.

Trying to be number one in all situations may be rooted in selfesteem needs, but it can be driven by force of habit as well. We simply become accustomed to thinking along these lines. It may be fruitful to monitor one's own competitiveness as it makes itself felt in various situations—and then make a conscious effort to tame this impulse. (“Why did I just interrupt him again? I'm trying to prove to everyone that I'm cleverer than he is. What if I just sat back and listened to what he had to say?” “Why am I resolving to go on a diet again—just because a woman who's thinner than I walked into the room? There are always going to be women thinner than I! Big deal!”) A directed awareness of our own competitiveness can help us to confront and transcend the reflexive urge to outdo everyone else.

All of these considerations are particularly relevant to raising or teaching children. A child's performance should never be compared with that of someone else (including a sibling, a classmate, or oneself as a child) in order to motivate her to do better. Affection and approval should not be made contingent on a child's performance. This means more than offering transparent consolations to a child who has lost. (“Oh. Well, as long as you did your best, honey.”) It means being genuinely unconcerned with the results of competitive encounters in which she is involved, including victories. We should be particularly alert to the subtle and insidious ways in which we encourage our children to tie their feelings of self-worth to winning; so long as
we
need them to be the best in their class, they will get the message and require the same of themselves. The result, as we have seen, is not excellence but anxiety, self-doubt, hostility, and a decline in intrinsic motivation, among other things.

The psychological and interpersonal damage wrought by competition is so severe that we should also let children know of it in explicit terms. There are school programs to tell children about the abuse of drugs, including tobacco and alcohol. Why not do the same with regard to mutually exclusive goal attainment? Surely the evidence is clear enough and the stakes high enough. Granted that what we do is more important than what we say; above all, we should not set children against one another and we should not act in such a way as to present them with competitive role models. But it also may be helpful to teach them—adjusting the lesson to their level of development, of course—about the myths of competition and the respects in which cooperation offers a healthier alternative. After all, we currently train children to compete (as chapter 2 describes), so we would not be moving from value-free education to indoctrination, but from a lesson in favor of competition to one against it. Let us show our children both how and why to cooperate.

***

All of this concerns intentional competition, the inclination to be better than others, which is a matter of values and self-esteem. There is every reason to attend to both in an effort to become less competitive. Still, the effectiveness of such efforts is circumscribed by the structure of our economic system, our schooling, and our leisure activities. If these are set up so as to condition one person's success on another's failure, then a healthy noncompetitive attitude will seem peculiar and downright maladaptive. It will, in any event, be difficult to sustain.

When I began to think about competition, I saw structural and intentional competition as reciprocally related in a fashion so perfectly balanced that they caused each other to the same degree. Over time I have come to revise this position, finally realizing that the structural level is far more significant. It is possible to minimize the importance of winning and losing, but to do so requires one to swim against the current, to ignore what is demanded by the structure of the activity. It is possible to remain on friendly terms with competitors, but the fact that their interests are inversely related to one's own predisposes each side to view the other with hostility. It is possible to be a “good sport,” but even this runs counter to the competitive imperative.

Let us consider a concrete illustration of how a structure can elicit particular behaviors. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University conducted a novel experiment on the effects of imprisonment by choosing 21 male college students to take on the roles of guards and inmates in a very realistic “prison” created in the basement of the psychology building. The 21 subjects were selected from a group of 75 volunteers precisely on the basis of their normality: they were stable and scored in the middle range of a personality profile. Equally important, they were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard. Almost immediately, the subjects began to take on the pathological characteristics of their respective roles. The guards delighted in devising arbitrary tasks and absurd rules for the inmates, demanding absolute obedience and forcing them to humiliate each other. The prisoners became passive and obedient, taking their frustration out on each other and otherwise assuming the role of victim. As the guards became more abusive, the prisoners became more helpless and dependent. The patterns became so pronounced that Zimbardo grew alarmed and ended what was to have been a two-week experiment after only six days.

Given the design of this experiment, what happened cannot be explained in terms of the individuals involved. The researchers, like the subjects, had been inclined to “focus on personality traits as internal dispositions for individuals to respond in particular ways,” thus “underestimating] the subtle power of situational forces to control and reshape their behavior.” Most of us make the same error, Zimbardo contends, leading us to try to solve problems by “changing the people, by motivating them, isolating them . . . and so on.” In fact, he concludes, “to change behavior we must discover the institutional supports which maintain the existing undesirable behavior and then design programs to alter these environments.”
⁴

This is nowhere more true than in the case of competition. We are constantly reinforced for wanting to be number one because this orientation is appropriate to the win/lose structure in which we keep finding ourselves. It is the fact of having to participate in contests that leads us to try to outdo others. And it is the fact of having to participate in contests that we are going to have to change if we want to move in healthier directions.

Nearly seventy years ago, John Harvey and his colleagues distinguished between “deliberate” and “involuntary” competition, which are roughly comparable to what I have been calling “intentional” and “structural,” respectively. “In the whole moral environment provided by our civilisation, involuntary competition easily becomes deliberate,” Harvey concluded. Among the personality traits that involuntary competition elicits, he says, is selfishness. “We would not set out to generate [this quality] deliberately, but we cannot escape from doing so incidentally and inadvertently so long as our commercial practice pits one against another, as now it does.”
⁵

William Sadler similarly insists that the structure determines how individuals look at the world:

 

The value orientation which holds competition high is perpetuated as individuals participate in institutions which help to shape their perception of reality. There is, in other words, a convergence of social forces which fosters a common perception of the world so that it is viewed in competitive terms. Added to this institutional factor is the dissipation of forces that would inhibit competition.
⁶

 

The evidence offered in chapters 5 and 6 substantiates this view.
Our psychological state and our relationships with others not only are correlated with the extent of our intentional competitiveness but are changed by a framework of structural competition
. Deutsch, to cite yet another study, found that “the psychological orientations of the subjects [including] their views of themselves and of the others in their group were considerably different as a function of the distributive system under which they worked.”
⁷
Another sort of evidence is provided by Susan Shirk's account of how Chinese students, who were cooperatively inclined, began to stop helping each other when a competitive structure was imposed on them.
⁸
Closer to home, one need only watch what happens to courteous and cooperative drivers when they move to a city where an informal but powerful structure demands competitive behavior on the roads: in remarkably short order, individual personality patterns shift to accommodate the structure.
⁹

The primacy of structural forces also can be demonstrated by showing that a
cooperative
framework changes behaviors and attitudes. After reviewing several strategies for lowering intentional competition, Terry Orlick wrote: “It may be more fruitful to introduce new games than to change old orientations. We may come closer to achieving our objectives if we simply let cooperative games do the shaping.”
¹⁰
When values follow from the structure, moreover, they are generalized throughout an individual's life, as Paul Breer and Edwin Locke found:

 

To the extent that a man is rewarded for putting the organization's goals first, harmonizing his own efforts with those of his colleagues, and making himself personally attractive to the people around him, he will develop situationally specific orientations in which co-operation, harmony, teamwork, etc. are seen as instrumental to success, intrinsically pleasurable, and morally desirable. From his job, such orientations can be expected to spill over to his family, community, and even society as a whole. This, it will be recalled, is precisely the sort of thing we found in the laboratory.
¹¹

 

A final example of the effects of structural cooperation is provided by Robert Axelrod. In the course of discussing the Prisoner's Dilemma game (in which a cooperative strategy proves most effective), Axelrod cites a fascinating historical illustration. During World War I, army battalions that faced each other from their respective trenches often agreed not to shoot—a kind of “live and let live” understanding that emerged spontaneously. This mutual restraint was, of course, infuriating to the high commands of both sides, but soldiers had the temerity to persist in not killing each other. Obviously they had not been predisposed to work together, having been trained to hate each other; structural cooperation took root in spite of their attitudes. In fact, the new arrangement
changed
these attitudes. Axelrod cites an incident in which a shot was fired inadvertently one day, prompting a German to call out, “We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt.” This apparently genuine concern, Axelrod comments, “goes well beyond a merely instrumental effort to prevent retaliation. . . . The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other's welfare.”
¹²
Individual orientations, in other words, were affected by the structure.