No Contest (9 page)

Whether competition promotes “success” (however we choose to define that word) seems a rather straightforward question—one that could be resolved by the available evidence. Many people, however, do not look at this evidence because they do not see the question as an empirical one. The most common defense of competition turns out to rest on the assumption that success (or productiveness or goal attainment)
means
competition. Given this assumption, the assertion that no one would get anything done without competition doesn't require proof; it is self-evident. “The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone,” wrote Elliot Aronson.
²

But success and competition are not at all the same thing. Put plainly, one can set and reach goals—or prove to one's own and others' satisfaction that one is competent—without ever competing. “Success in achieving a goal does not depend upon winning over others just as failing to achieve a goal does not mean losing to others.”
³
A moment's reflection reveals this as an undeniable truth. I can succeed in knitting a scarf or writing a book without ever trying to make it better than yours. Better yet, I can work
with
you—say, to prepare a dinner or build a house. Many people take the absence of competition to mean that one must be wandering aimlessly, without any goals. But competing simply means that one is working toward a goal in such a way as to prevent others from reaching
their
goals. This is one approach to getting something done, but (happily) not the only one. Competition need never enter the picture in order for skills to be mastered and displayed, goals set and met.

Given that success and competition are
conceptually
distinct, how are they related in the real world? Does competition really make us more motivated to complete tasks? To do these tasks well? To learn better? Let us turn to the evidence on achievement and productivity and then speculate on the reasons behind what it reveals.

 

ACHIEVEMENT AND COMPETITION

 

The question posed by this chapter's title requires a point of reference: Is competition more productive than
what
? To ask this is to realize that it makes little sense to inquire whether competition has ever led anyone to be productive. It is far more useful to determine whether we are substantially more productive in competitive situations than in other situations—or, better yet, whether competition is sufficiently superior to other arrangements as to outweigh its costs. These other arrangements, as set out in chapter i, are cooperation (working together so that my success is linked to yours) and independent effort (working alone so that my success doesn't affect yours). Some of the studies that are reviewed below contrast competition with one or the other, but a comparative picture of all three eventually emerges.

What we want to ask is this:
Do we perform better when we are trying to beat others than when we are working with them or alone?
It is necessary, of course, to specify the nature of the task, the measure of performance, the age and temperament of the subjects, the setting of the experiment, and a dozen other variables. But the evidence is so overwhelmingly clear and consistent that the answer to this question already can be reported:
almost never
. Superior performance not only does not
require
competition; it usually seems to require its absence.

This conclusion, to say nothing of the near unanimity of the data, will be astonishing to most readers—even those generally critical of competition. As the preceding chapter noted, we are carefully trained not only to compete but to believe that a competitive arrangement results in superior performance. This belief has practically attained the status of received truth in our society, so a consideration of the evidence could (or should, at any rate) have a profound impact on how our schools and workplaces are structured.

The great majority of studies cited in this chapter, as will quickly become apparent, have to do with education—or, more precisely, with learning tasks (anagrams, card games, problem solving, and so forth). Some are even set in the classroom and use standard curricular material. While subjects range in age from preschool to adult, most tend to be either undergraduates or in the elementary school range. Research measuring other kinds of performance is, unfortunately, in short supply, but what does exist along these lines supports the same conclusion.

Margaret M. Clifford assumed, as many of us would have, that a competitive game would help fifth-grade students to learn a set of vocabulary words. “However, contrary to prediction, neither performance nor retention was noticeably improved,” she reported, and while the competition did seem to spark some interest, it did so mostly among the winners.
⁴
Morton Goldman and his associates discovered that undergraduates solved anagrams more effectively when they were cooperating rather than competing with each other.
⁵
Abaineh Workie found “cooperation significantly more productive than competition” for high school students working on a card game.
⁶
A well-known experiment that Morton Deutsch conducted with college students in 1948 turned up the same result, and, when he returned to the topic twenty-five years later, he was able to cite thirteen other studies that replicated his findings.
⁷

A review of thirteen studies all showing that competition does not get results sounds impressive. But David and Roger Johnson and their colleagues published a far more ambitious meta-analysis (that is, review of others' findings) in 1981.
⁸
In what is surely the most conclusive survey of its kind, they reviewed 12a studies from 1924 to 1980 (only one of which overlaps with Deutsch's list, incidentally), including every North American study they could find that considered achievement or performance data in competitive, cooperative, and/or individualistic structures. The remarkable results: 65 studies found that cooperation promotes higher achievement than competition, 8 found the reverse, and 36 found no statistically significant difference. Cooperation promoted higher achievement than independent work in 108 studies, while 6 found the reverse, and 42 found no difference. The superiority of cooperation held for all subject areas and all age groups.
⁹

A number of qualifications about these conclusions have been proposed, some of which appear to be valid. Cooperation is more effective when the group is smaller
¹⁰
and when the task is more complex (particularly if it involves sophisticated problem solving).
¹¹
Cooperation's relative effectiveness depends on the degree to which subjects have to rely on each other in the means by which they accomplish a task. The more “means interdependent” the task, the more cooperation helps.
¹²
In some instances, it is claimed, competition may produce better results—but only if the task is simple (such as rote decoding or carrying objects) and not interdependent at all. Even this caveat is questionable, however; the Johnsons contend that, at worst, the margin of cooperation's superiority is reduced in certain tasks.

 

Currently there is no type of task on which cooperative efforts are
less
effective than are competitive or individualistic efforts, and on most tasks (and especially the more important learning tasks such as concept attainment, verbal problem solving, categorization, spatial problem solving, retention and memory, motor, guessing-judging-predicting) cooperative efforts are more effective in promoting achievement.
¹³

 

Some of the older studies, including Deutsch's, set up the cooperative condition so that the subjects were cooperating with others in their group but the groups were competing with each other. (This is similar to the arrangement in Japanese industry, which lately has attracted considerable attention in this country: employees within a given company work closely with each other and are encouraged to develop loyalty to the company, but the companies continue to compete with each other.) This cooperative/competitive arrangement led some scholars, reasonably enough, to ask whether the greater achievement levels in cooperative settings were not actually due to the intergroup competition. By now enough experimenters have controlled for this variable so that we can be quite certain the answer is no. Unequivocally, “performance benefits [from] cooperative conditions whether [they involve] additional intergroup competition or not,” as Emmy Pepitone wrote in 1980.
¹⁴
This may be because “students in an intragroup cooperation/intergroup competition situation behave primarily as if the intergroup competition did not exist.”
¹⁵

In recent years, Deutsch and his associates have investigated not only the way tasks are set up but the way rewards are distributed. Among the possibilities are a winner-take-all system (which is what many contests amount to), a distribution proportional to accomplishment, and an equal distribution. Much as we tend to assume that competing boosts performance, so it is often taken for granted that the first two arrangements provide a crucial incentive for working hard: reserving a desirable reward for the winner is thought to promote excellence. A series of six experiments with Columbia University students, involving tasks that ranged from decoding Japanese poetry to estimating the number of jellybeans in ajar, was devised to test this assumption. The results: When tasks could be performed independently—that is, when there was low means interdependence—the system of distributing rewards had no effect on how good a job they did. There was absolutely no evidence to suggest that people work more productively when rewards are tied to performance than when everyone gets the same reward. But for those tasks where success depends on working together, there
was
a clear difference. A system of equal rewards, Deutsch discovered, “gives the best results and the competitive winner-take-all system gives the poorest results.”
¹⁶

Many of the studies I have been reviewing define achievement in a rather conventional, quantified way. Traditional examinations to measure what has been learned in a classroom, for example, are biased in favor of the competitive approach, and this may account for why some studies found no significant differences between competition and cooperation.
¹⁷
It is remarkable, then, that even with such measures, competition does not work well.

Once we move from such measures of achievement as speed of performance, number of problems solved, or amount of information recalled, though, and consider the
quality
of performance, we find that competition fares even worse. Some of the rather primitive experiments in the 1920s that found people work faster at a mechanical task when they are competing nevertheless discovered that the quality of work was poorer under competitive conditions.
¹⁸
More recent research confirms that “significantly more complex products were made in the cooperative condition than in the competitive condition”
¹⁹
and that “the discussion process in cooperative groups promotes the discovery and development of higher quality cognitive strategies for learning than does the individual reasoning found in competitive and individualistic learning situations.”
²⁰
Creative problem solving was similarly hampered by competition in a study of undergraduates.
²¹
A 1983 German study found that the competitiveness of fourth graders (as measured by a 15-item picture test) correlated negatively with school achievement.
²²

So far from making us more productive, then, a structure that pits us against one another tends to inhibit our performance. Children simply do not learn better when education is transformed into competitive struggle. To be sure, from the teacher's perspective it can be seductive to turn a lesson into a competitive game in order to attract and hold students' attention. But the real appeal of this strategy is that it makes teaching easier, not more effective; it circumvents rather than solves pedagogical problems. The fact that children seem to enjoy it says virtually nothing about how well it teaches them. And even the enjoyment may not be what it appears: the fact that a game is being substituted for the usual lesson—rather than the competitive nature of this game—could account for students' interest. Many teachers conclude that competition holds attention better even though they have never worked with cooperative alternatives. (Indeed, evidence reviewed in the last chapter shows that children tend to prefer cooperation once they have experienced it.)

Most of American education is highly individualistic, fueled by a competitive structure of evaluation. Sometimes competition (either individual or group) also finds its way into the curriculum itself. Given the unrelenting race for good grades,
²³
this more explicit use of competition strikes the student as perfectly natural. On the other hand, cooperation of the kind described in all these studies is unfamiliar—no more than an abstraction, really—to many of us, including teachers. It is worth considering in more detail how a cooperative classroom actually works.

Cooperation means more than putting people into groups. It suggests, rather, group participation in a project where the result is the product of common effort, the goal is shared, and each member's success is linked with every other's. Practically, this means that ideas and materials, too, will be shared, labor sometimes will be divided, and everyone in the group will be rewarded for successful completion of the task. Aronson, for example, conceived the “jigsaw method” of learning: When the task is to learn about the life of a well-known person, each member of a group is given information about one period of the individual's life. Members of the group are thus dependent on each other in order to complete the assignment.
²⁴
The brothers Johnson, by contrast, offered a straightforward assignment (“How many things can our group find that make a difference in how long [a] candle burns?”) that involved less structured division of labor.
²⁵
Elsewhere they suggest setting up groups of students who represent a range of abilities and instructing them to help one another. “When everyone in their group has mastered the solutions, they go look for another group to help until everyone in the class understands how to work the problems.”
²⁶