No Contest (45 page)

107. Julian Baum, “Friendship No Longer Ranks Ahead of Winning for Chinese Olympians.” Terry Orlick, however, offers a very different account of Chinese athletes and their fans—one that suggests winning is far less important to them than to their American counterparts (
Winning Through Cooperation,
pp. 69–77).

108. Susan L. Shirk,
Competitive Comrades,
p. 162.

109. Nelson and Kagan, “Competition,” p. 90.

110. Margaret Mead, p. 495.

111. Gorney,
Human Agenda,
pp. 159–60.

112. Gorney, “Cultural Determinants of Achievement, Aggression, and Psychological Distress.”

113. Margaret Mead, p. 511.

114. Ibid., pp. 481–82.

115. Ibid., p. 463.

116. William O. Johnson, “From Here to 2000,” p. 443.

117. Two psychoanalysts who have applied themselves to sports psychology are Arnold R. Beisser, in
The Madness in Sports
(particularly the chapter entitled “The Problem of Winning”), and Robert A. Moore, in
Sports and Mental Health
.

118. Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents,
p. 58.

119. Ibid., p. 59.

120. Anna Freud,
Normality and Pathology in Childhood,
p. 150.

121. Ian Suttie,
The Origins of Love and Hate,
p. 20 and
passim
. This is a reference to the interdependent character of competitive interaction—which is also implicit in Piaget's formulation.

122. Gorney,
Human Agenda,
p. 472.

123. Herbert Hendin,
The Age of Sensation,
p. 97.

124. As with psychoanalysts, social psychologists generally do not explicitly argue in this manner that competition is unavoidable; social comparison theory instead is used by others to support their belief that this is the case. The theory itself was derived indirectly from the thought of George Herbert Mead (see especially
Mind, Self, and Society)
and articulated most clearly by Leon Festinger in his classic article, “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes.”

125. Rainer Martens, “Competition: In Need of a Theory,” p. 13.

126. Albert Bandura,
Social Learning Theory,
p. 132.

127. Jerome Kagan,
The Nature of the Child,
p. 273.

128. Joseph Veroff, “Social Comparison and the Development of Achievement Motivation,” p. 55.

129. Carl Rogers, for example, writes that healthy development is characterized by the individual's coming to feel that the “locus of evaluation lies within himself”
(On Becoming a Person,
p. 119).

130. Irving Goldman, “Bathonga,” p. 360.

131. Harvey et al., pp. 176–77.

 

CHAPTER
3

 

1. Spiro Agnew, “In Defense of Sport,” pp. 257–58. One does not,have to look very hard to find similar sentiments in other quarters. Sociologist Harry Edwards, for example, quotes a high school principal as saying, “If we had a country of individuals who didn't value competitiveness, we would have chaos, anarchy, and zero productivity” (
Sociology of Sport,
p. 119).

2. Aronson, p. 152.

3. Johnson and Johnson, “Structure,” p. 218. John Harvey similarly notes: “The defeat of the unsuccessful has nothing to do with the real value of success” (p. 14).

4. Margaret M. Clifford, “Effect of Competition as a Motivational Technique in the Classroom” (1972).

5. Morton Goldman et al., “Intergroup and Intragroup Competition and Cooperation” (1977).

6. Abaineh Workie, “The Relative Productivity of Cooperation and Competition” (1974).

7. Deutsch,
Resolution of Conflict
.

8. The Johnson brothers are probably this country's most prolific contributors to the study of competition and cooperation in the classroom. Both educators and social psychologists at the University of Minnesota, they have published, at last count, about 100 books and articles on the subject—most of them within the last decade. Besides conducting and reviewing research, they serve as consultants to other educators, demonstrating cooperative teaching strategies.

9. David W. Johnson et al., “Effects of Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Goal Structures on Achievement: A Meta-Analysis” (hereafter “Meta-Analysis”).

10. Ibid., p. 53.

11. Ibid., p. 54; Bryant J. Cratty,
Social Psychology in Athletics,
p. 76; Johnson and Johnson, “Structure,” p. 220.

12. Morton Goldman et al.; David R. Schmitt, “Performance Under Cooperation or Competition,” pp. 660–62. However, Dorcas Butt rightly notes that “there are very few situations in life in which people are not interdependent”
(Psychology of Sport,
p. 41 n.).

13. Johnson and Johnson, “The Socialization and Achievement Crisis: Are Cooperative Learning Experiences the Solution?” (hereafter “Crisis”), p. 146.

14. Pepitone, p. 30.

15. Johnson and Johnson,
Learning Together and Alone
(hereafter
Learning),
p. 191. A few years later, the Johnsons went further, suggesting that “cooperation without intergroup competition [may promote] higher achievement and productivity than cooperation with intergroup competition,” based on their meta-analysis (“Meta-Analysis,” p. 57).

16. Deutsch,
Distributive Justice,
p. 163. The research and its findings are described in detail in his chapter 10: “Experimental Studies of the Effects of Different Systems of Distributive Justice.”

17. See Johnson and Johnson, “Structure,” pp. 220–21.

18. For example, see Irving C. Whittemore's 1924 paper, “The Influence of Competition on Performance: An Experimental Study,” p. 245.

19. Pepitone, p. 234. This study involved almost 1000 children, ages five 10 eleven.

20. Johnson and Johnson, “Crisis,” p. 146.

21. John C. Adams, Jr., “Effects of Competition and Open Receptivity on Creative Productivity,” pp. 16–17.

22. H.-J. Lerch and M. Rubensal, “Eine Analyse des Zusammenhangs zwischen Schulleistungen und dem Wetteifermotiv.”

23. Deutsch has written a provocative essay on the effects of grading in American schools. He argues that grades (1) do not assess actual accomplishment so much as turn education into a contest in which students “are measured primarily in comparison with one another”; (a) do not intrinsically motivate students better than a cooperative system; (3) actually serve the purposes of setting students against one another, thereby inhibiting collective action, and socializing them to accept and succeed in a competitive, capitalist culture; and (4) ignore social contexts in mistakenly assuming that the individual can and should be evaluated independently. His conclusion: “If the competitive grading system in our schools—a less corrupted version of a competitive merit system than the one that characterizes our larger society—does not foster a social environment that is conducive to individual well-being and effective social cooperation, why would one expect that such values would be fostered in a society that is dominated by a competitive, meritocratic ideology? If the competitive-hierarchical atmosphere is not good for our children, is it good for us?” (Deutsch, “Education and Distributive Justice.”)

24. Aronson, pp. 206–10.

25. Johnson and Johnson,
Learning,
pp. 79–80. The whole of this book provides teachers—particularly at the elementary school level—with useful suggestions for implementing a cooperative curriculum.

26. Johnson and Johnson, “Crisis,” p. 122.

27. Johnson and Johnson, “Structure,” p. 226.

28. Johnson and Johnson, “Crisis,” p. 149. In fact, even the widely held assumption that “students learn more or better in homogeneous groups . . . is simply not true.” A review of hundreds of studies fails to support this assumption even with respect to higher-level students (Jeannie Oakes,
Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality,
p. 7).

29. Johnson and Johnson, “The Internal Dynamics of Cooperative Learning Groups,” p. 105.

30. Stuart Yager et al., “Oral Discussion, Group-to-Individual Transfer, and Achievement in Cooperative Learning Groups,” p. 65.

31. John S. Wodarski et al., “Individual Consequences Versus Different Shared Consequences Contingent on the Performance of Low-Achieving Group Members” (1973), pp. 288–89.

32. Peter M. Blau, “Cooperation and Competition in a Bureaucracy.”

33. Robert L. Helmreich et al., “Making It in Academic Psychology: Demographic and Personality Correlates of Attainment,” pp. 897, 902.

34. Helmreich et al., “Achievement Motivation and Scientific Attainment,” p. 224.

35. Janet T. Spence and Robert L. Helmreich, “Achievement-related Motives and Behavior” (hereafter “Achievement-related”), p. 53.

36. Ibid., p. 52.

37. Helmreich, “Pilot Selection and Training.”

38. Helmreich et al., “The Honeymoon Effect in Job Performance.”

39. Georgia Sassen, “Sex Role Orientation, Sex Differences, and Concept of Success,” pp. 38–39. The study involved twenty-eight undergraduates. Competitiveness was measured by a “Competitiveness of Success-Concept” test that she devised.

40. Teresa M. Amabile, “Children's Artistic Creativity," p. 576. There was high interjudge reliability (.77) with respect to the seven artists.

41. Will Crutchfield, “The Ills of Piano Competitions.” Béla Bartók once said, “Competitions are for horses, not artists” (cited in Carl Battaglia, “Piano Competitions: Talent Hunt or Sport?” p. 31).

42. Sandra McElwaine writes: “If competition is one of the passwords in Washington, nowhere is it more keenly felt than in the media. News is big business in the capital, and for the thousands of reporters covering the Government it is a constant hustle to find a different angle. The pervasive rivalry that results can produce depression, anxiety and insecurity, leading many to seek psychiatric aid” (“On the Couch in the Capital,” p. 63).

43. Jay Winsten, “Science and the Media: The Boundaries of Truth,” p. 8.

44. “The result has been a spiraling competition, sometimes characterized by exaggerated claims, in which ‘science by press conference' has begun to replace the traditional mode of scientific discourse” (ibid., pp. 14–15).

45. Stephen Klaidman, “TV's Collusive Role.” Klaidman is senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics.

46. The comments of Fred Friendly, former head of CBS News and now journalism professor emeritus at Columbia University, are paraphrased by Adam Pertman in his article, “Media Observers Say News Coverage Is Pressuring U.S. to Act.”

47. Johnson and Johnson, “Processes,” p. 22.

48. Helmreich et al., “Making It in Academic Psychology,” p. 907.

49. Spence and Helmreich, “Achievement-related,” p. 55.

50. John McMurty is quoted by William O. Johnson, “From Here to 2000,” p. 446. Robert N. Singer and Richard F. Gerson wrote as follows: “If the athlete is being evaluated only on the basis of whether or not a rival has been beaten, little information is really provided relating to the level of excellence achieved in performance” (“Athletic Competition for Children,” p. 253). Frank Winer similarly distinguishes between trying to improve one's skill and trying to win (“The Elderly Jock and How He Got That Way” [hereafter “Elderly Jock”], p. 193).

51. Lisa Belkin, “Young Albany Debaters Resolve Who's Best.”

52. Marvin E. Frankel, “The Search for Truth,” pp. 1037, 1039.

53. I. Nelson Rose, “Litigator's Fallacy,” pp. 92–93.

54. Thurman Arnold is quoted in Anne Strick,
Injustice for All,
p. 109. Strick's book offers a comprehensive indictment of the adversarial model, demonstrating that the problems frequently attributed to our legal system are “due less to any venality or inadequacy of the legal professionals than to the intrinsic nature of the adversary ethic itself” (p. 16). She urges that “consensus through cooperative exploration . . . replace the concept of truth through battle” (p. 217), whereas Rose recommends the more modest change of “shifting the emphasis in the Canons of Ethics from lawyers as zealous advocates of their individual client's interests to lawyers as well-considered representatives of the interests of the public” (p. 95).

55. John Knowles,
A Separate Peace,
p. 46.

56. George B. Leonard,
Education and Ecstasy,
p. 129.

57. David N. Campbell, “On Being Number One,” pp. 145–46. Morton Deutsch also observes that “through the repeated and pervasive experience of competitive struggle for scarce goods in the classroom, students are socialized into believing that this is not only the just way but also . . . natural and inevitable” (“Education and Distributive Justice,” p. 394).

58. “The idea is essentially, ‘Make my kid suffer now so he gets used to it. Teach him to claw his way to the top by any means necessary. Teach him to hate those who win and himself when he loses and despise those who don't make it'” (Campbell, p. 144).

59. Clifford, pp. 134–35.

60. See, for example, Matina Horner, “Performance of Men in Noncompetitive and Interpersonal Competitive Achievement-Oriented Situations.”

61. Edward L. Deci et al., “When Trying to Win: Competition and Intrinsic Motivation,” p. 79. It is true that very competitive people may be said to have internalized the motivator. Structural competition then becomes fully intentional—a matter of temperament. With such people, the problems with extrinsic motivators may not be the best explanation for achievement differentials. For most of us, though, the appeal of the activity itself and the reward of being better than someone else remain very different.

62. Johnson and Johnson, “Processes,” p. 16.