No Contest: The Case Against Competition Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  The “Number One” Obsession

  Is Competition Inevitable?

  Is Competition More Productive?

  Is Competition More Enjoyable?

  Does Competition Build Character?

  Against Each Other

  The Logic of Playing Dirty

  Women and Competition

  Beyond Competition

  Learning Together

  Afterword

  Notes

  References

  Index

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 1986, 1992 by Alfie Kohn

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Kohn, Alfie.

  No contest : the case against competition / Alfie Kohn.

  —Rev. ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-395-63125-6

  1. Competition (Psychology) 2. Cooperativeness. 3. Aggressiveness (Psychology) 4. Social interaction—United States. I. Title.

  HM291.K634 1992

  302'.14—dc20 92-26141

  CIP

  eISBN 978-0-547-52739-0

  v1.1113

  The author is grateful for permission to use excerpts from:

  “Success Anxiety in Women” by Georgia Sassen in Harvard Educational Review, February 1980, 50:1. Copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

  “Mama Told Me Not to Come” by Randy Newman. Copyright © 1966 by January Music Corp. Assigned to Unichappell Music, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

  Books and articles quoted or cited in the text under the usual fair use allowances are acknowledged in the notes and references.

  Acknowledgments

  For almost every person who writes a book, there is a circle of friends, relatives, and (if the author is sufficiently preoccupied with the project) even casual acquaintances who have been subjected to conversation about it. A well-known writer once turned me down for an interview, claiming he didn’t like to talk about whatever he was working on at the time lest his energies be drained. This still baffles me. For the last ten years, I’ve been eager to talk about competition with anyone who spoke English. The many discussions that resulted have refined my thinking on the subject immeasurably, and I’m grateful to those who have listened and questioned and argued. The same goes for those who spoke up after more formal talks I’ve given in the Boston area and for my students at Tufts University and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education who wrestled with the topic for an entire semester. No one had to put up with more than those who live (or have lived) in the cooperative house I lived in for five years: Carol Hetrick, Phil Korman, Ellen Carlino, Marianne Takas, Jeb Brugmann, Claudia Cahan, Bob Irwin, Carol Dirga, Don Bishop, and Lynne Weiss.

  My interest in competition can be understood in this context: I am fascinated by questions that seem basic to being human, that address us as whole persons rather than just as disembodied intellects, and that cannot be dealt with adequately within the confines of a single academic discipline. That I have such an orientation is due largely to two people: Rob Beneckson awakened it, prodding me to start reading in psychology and helping me to read critically. George Morgan shaped it, becoming for me a mentor in the best sense of that word—and, later, a treasured friend.

  My original plan was to edit a collection of essays on competition, but it wasn’t long before I realized I had a lot more to say than could be contained in an introduction. While I was trying to say it, I pressed drafts of chapters on people whose judgment I valued, hoping for critical readings. I was not disappointed, and I am pleased to thank Laura Schenk, Claire Baker, Phil Korman, Stewart and Estelle Kohn, Susan Hewitt, Marianne Takas, and Georgia Sassen, all of whom helped me to reach a much-needed sense of perspective in addition to suggesting revisions large and small. I’ve learned about cooperative learning from a number of people since the first edition of this book was published; if I mention only Eric Schaps and David Johnson, it’s because they were kind enough to read and comment on my new chapter that deals with the topic. (Alisa Harrigan did so, too, but she has my gratitude for a lot more than that.)

  Bill Greene’s contribution merits a separate paragraph. In view of his agile intelligence, I would have been happy with even a small helping of his help. I was lucky enough to receive more hours than I can count: he read every chapter, said a great deal about them—all of it useful—and forced me to rewrite and rethink much of what follows. Whatever you think of this book, it is far better than it would have been without his help. The legal profession is lucky to have him.

  With all of this advice and guidance, it would have been a shame to keep the final product all to myself. This is where Larry Kessenich and John Ware came in. Their enthusiasm for the project is responsible for turning it into a published book. I have not only Larry but also Ruth Hapgood, Lois Randall, and Gerry Morse to thank for editing, as well.

  Let me note, finally, that most of the research for this book was done in the libraries of Harvard University, the size of whose holdings is matched only by the school’s determination to restrict access to them. I am delighted to have been able to use these resources, and it hardly matters that I was afforded this privilege only because the school thought I was someone else.

  At every quarterly examination a gold medal was given to the best writer. When the first medal was offered, it produced rather a general contention than an emulation and diffused a spirit of envy, jealousy, and discord through the whole school; boys who were bosom friends before became fierce contentious rivals, and when the prize was adjudged became implacable enemies. Those who were advanced decried the weaker performances; each wished his opponent’s abilities less than his own, and they used all their little arts to misrepresent and abuse each other’s performances.

  —Robert Coram, Political Inquiries (1791)

  1

  The “Number One” Obsession

  Life for us has become an endless succession of contests. From the moment the alarm clock rings until sleep overtakes us again, from the time we are toddlers until the day we die, we are busy struggling to outdo others. This is our posture at work and at school, on the playing field and back at home. It is the common denominator of American life.

  Precisely because we are so immersed in it, competition can easily escape our notice. A fish does not reflect on the nature of water, Walker Percy once remarked, “he cannot imagine its absence, so he cannot consider its presence.”1 Even those who think and write for a living have paid surprisingly little attention to the subject. In the last fifty years, for example, no one has written a book that explores the very idea of competition and the way it plays itself out in all the varied arenas of human life. I do not mean a lament about what has happened to sports today or a recipe for being a winner in business or a statistical operation performed on abstractions that issue from experimental games. These roll off the presses regularly. I mean a look at what it really means to try to beat other people, a careful investigation of this arrangement that requires some people to fail in order that others can succeed.

  If such an analysis is long past due, the need for it is nowhere more urgent than
in this country. Different cultures depend on competition to different degrees in structuring their economic system or schooling or recreation. At one end of the spectrum are societies that function without any competition at all. At the other end is the United States. Here is social psychologist Elliot Aronson:

  From the Little League ball player who bursts into tears after his team loses, to the college students in the football stadium chanting “We’re number one!”; from Lyndon Johnson, whose judgment was almost certainly distorted by his oft-stated desire not to be the first American President to lose a war, to the third grader who despises his classmate for a superior performance on an arithmetic test; we manifest a staggering cultural obsession with victory.2

  Others have used similar language. “Competition is almost our state religion,” says one observer.3 It is “an American cultural addiction,” remarks another.4 “Resistance to competition is viewed as suspiciously un-American,” notes a third.5

  This does not mean that competition is found only in the United States. The examples offered in this book will likely seem familiar to readers elsewhere. But what may be merely familiar in other places has reached exaggerated, often ludicrous, proportions in this country. We can see this both in the pervasiveness of competitive activities and in the fervor with which we approach them. Our economic system is predicated on competition, while our schooling, from the earliest grades, trains us not only to triumph over others but to regard them as obstacles to our own success. Our leisure time is filled with highly structured games in which one individual or team must defeat another. Even within the family there is rivalry—a muted but often desperate struggle that treats approval as a scarce commodity and turns love into a kind of trophy.

  Not only do we get carried away with competitive activities, but we turn almost everything else into a contest. Our collective creativity seems to be tied up in devising new ways to produce winners and losers. It is not enough that we struggle against our colleagues at work to be more productive; we also must compete for the title of Friendliest Employee. The only way we can think of to socialize with the people who work for another company is to try to beat them in a competitive game. If we want to escape all of this by, say, going out dancing, we find that even here we are involved in a contest. No corner of our lives is too trivial—or too important—to be exempted from the compulsion to rank ourselves against one another. Even where no explicit contest has been set up, we tend to construe the world in competitive terms. Several years ago, to cite one small illustration, the New York Times Magazine featured a profile of Plácido Domingo that declared he had “challenged Luciano Pavarotti—and, many say, surpassed him—for the title of the world’s leading tenor.”6 Opera, too, cannot be enjoyed without our thinking in terms of who is number one.

  Thus it is that Vince Lombardi’s famous comment—“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing”—must be understood not merely as the expression of one football coach’s fanaticism, but as a capsule description of our entire culture.7 Our lives are not merely affected by, but structured upon, the need to be “better than.” We seem to have reached a point where doing our jobs, educating our children, and even relaxing on the weekends have to take place in the context of a struggle where some must lose. That there might be other ways to do these things is hard for us to imagine—or, rather, it would be hard if we were sufficiently reflective about our competitiveness to think about alternatives in the first place. Mostly we just accept it as “the way life is.”

  The current celebration of business competition makes these issues particularly timely. Bookstores have been deluged with guides to winning in the marketplace largely because of the rhetoric spilling out of Washington over the last few years. The competition that has been indiscriminately encouraged actually has the effect of shifting power from elected representatives to private corporations, from those who are theoretically accountable to all citizens to those who are, at best, accountable to only the tiny fraction of people who stand to make a profit. (Half of all corporate stock is owned by one percent of the population, while 81 percent of all families own no stock at all.)8 But even if the mystique of corporate success becomes less fashionable after a few years—even if public officials no longer see themselves chiefly as cheerleaders for private industry—our economic system is fundamentally grounded in competition, and an exploration of the subject will continue to be relevant. Moreover, I am concerned in this book with far more than the machinations of the business world. Competition is a deeply ingrained, profoundly enduring, part of our lives, and it is time to look more closely at what it does to us.

  ***

  Let us begin with a more precise formulation of the topic. I think it is useful to distinguish between what might be called structural competition and intentional competition. The former refers to a situation; the latter, to an attitude. Whereas structural competition has to do with the win/lose framework, which is external, intentional competition is internal; it concerns the desire on the part of an individual to he number one.

  To say that an activity is structurally competitive is to say that it is characterized by what I will call mutually exclusive goal attainment (“MEGA,” for short). This means, very simply, that my success requires your failure. Our fates are negatively linked. If one of us must lose exactly as much as the other wins, as in poker, then we are talking about a “zero-sum game.” But in any MEGA arrangement, two or more individuals are trying to achieve a goal that cannot be achieved by all of them. This is the essence of competition, as several social scientists have observed.9

  The same phenomenon sometimes has been described as a situation of scarcity. This does not explain competition but simply restates if. If I must try to defeat you in order to get what I want, then what I want is scarce by definition. We need to be careful not to confuse this sort of scarcity with the kind that refers to an objective shortage of some commodity. It is possible, of course, for two hungry people to compete for a single bowl of stew. But in most contests, the goal is simply a prized status. Structural competition usually involves the comparison of several individuals in such a way that only one of them can be the best. The competition itself sets the goal, which is to win; scarcity is thereby created out of nothing.

  Structural competitions can be distinguished according to several criteria. Competitions vary, for instance, with respect to how many winners there will be. Not everyone who applies for admission to a given college will be accepted, but my acceptance does not necessarily preclude yours (although it will make it somewhat less likely). On the other hand, only one woman in a bathing suit will be crowned Miss America each year, and if Miss Montana wins, Miss New Jersey cannot. In both of these competitions, notice that winning is the result of someone’s subjective judgment. In other cases, such as arm wrestling, pre-established and reasonably straightforward criteria determine who wins.

  Beauty contests and college admissions also share another feature: neither requires any direct interaction among the contestants. The success of one simply rules out or reduces the chances for success of another. There is a stronger version of structural competition in which one contestant must make the other(s) fail in order to succeed himself. War is one example. Tennis is another. Whereas two bowlers competing for a trophy take turns doing the same thing and do not interfere with each other, two tennis players actively work at defeating each other. Which of these postures is in evidence depends on the rules of the game, the type of structural competition that is involved.

  Intentional competition is much easier to define—although its nuances are quite complex indeed, as we shall see later. Here we are simply talking about an individual’s competitiveness, his or her proclivity for besting others. This can take place in the absence of structural competition, as all of us have observed: someone may arrive at a party and be concerned to prove he is the most intelligent or attractive person in the room even though no prizes are offered and no one else has given any thought to the matter. The psycho
analyst Karen Horney described as neurotic someone who “constantly measures himself against others, even in situations which do not call for it.”10

  The reverse situation—structural competition without intentional competition—is also possible. You may be concerned simply to do the best you can (without any special interest in being better than others), yet find yourself in a situation where this entails competing. Here it is the structure rather than your intention that defines success as victory. Perhaps you are even averse to competing but find yourself unable to avoid it—an unhappy and stressful state of affairs known to many of us. The most extreme case of structural competition without intentional competition is a circumstance in which individuals are ranked and rewarded without even being aware of it. Students may be sorted on the basis of their grades even if they are not trying to defeat each other. (The distinction between the two varieties of competition is especially useful in allowing us to make sense of such a scenario.)

  Finally, let us take note of the rather obvious fact that competition can exist among individuals or among groups. The latter does not rule out the former: even as two corporations or nations or basketball teams are competing with each other, it is possible that the people within these groups can be vying for money or status. Competition among groups is known as intergroup competition, while competition among individuals within a group is called intragroup competition. These distinctions will prove important in later chapters.

  ***

  Competition is not the only way to organize a classroom or a workplace. This is hardly a controversial observation, but because we have come to take competition for granted, we rarely think about alternatives. In this book, following the lead of most social psychologists, I will be considering three ways of achieving one’s goals: competitively, which means working against others; cooperatively, which means working with others; and independently, which means working without regard to others. Although we sometimes speak of an individual or a culture as being both competitive and individualistic, it is important to realize that they are not the same. There is a difference between allowing one person to succeed only if someone else does not, on the one hand, and allowing that person to succeed irrespective of the other’s success or failure, on the other. Your success and mine are related in both competition and cooperation (though in opposite ways); they are unrelated if we work independently.