OCT-NOV 97 - HOME

The Case against Competition and Rewards

Competition is just the way the world is, the way life is, the way our nature is." That assumption has been offered so many times in so many arenas, that I thought there must be a substantial body of research behind it. But I've been studying competition for fifteen years and have yet to find a shred of evidence to support that myth. We compete because we're raised that way-not because we're born that way.

Whenever various characteristics are attributed to human nature, it's useful to ask: Who benefits from the assumption? The assumption that competition is intrinsic to human nature is a profoundly conservative argument masquerading as realism. It is convenient to assume that competition is wired into our nature because then we don't have to do the hard work of making social change. But evidence from cross-cultural anthropology, from early childhood education, and from other fields suggests that competition is a function of humanly created institutions and is perpetuated when we raise kids to "fit in" and become "winners" instead of helping them question the system that sets us against each other.

The first game I ever learned was at a birthday party when children scrambled for chairs when the music stopped. Then there were the spelling bees and whichever row is quietest gets dismissed for lunch first and the awful bumper sticker "My child is an honor student." I think it's possible to have competition without tangible reward, though the status of winning itself becomes a reward in many institutions. It's also possible to have a reward without competition. For example, we can get students to think about going to school in order to get good grades-which is bad enough-but at least there's no competition involved if we set it up so that every student can get an A. But we take a bad thing and make it much worse if we grade on a curve, creating an artificial scarcity so that my chance of getting an A is reduced by your getting one. I argue in No Contest that it doesn't make sense to set up competition so that you can succeed only if I fail.

We need to stop talking about competitiveness as if that were something good and just look at the data instead. That's what I did when I wrote No Contest. I found hundreds of studies collecting dust on library shelves, showing that competition undermines people's self-esteem, poisons all relationships, and is counterproductive with respect to effectiveness. I uncovered evidence suggesting that our common assumptions about competition are simply not supported by the data. Study after study shows that if a bunch of people are given a puzzle to solve and half the people are told, "See if you can solve this," and the other half are told, "This is a contest-see if you can solve this puzzle better than anyone else in the room," the people in the second group won't do as well. Merely introducing competition prevents people from doing their best work, and quality tends to suffer, perhaps having to do with concentration and other matters. At least seventy studies have shown that the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they do to get the reward.

Some people try to justify competition by saying it's survival of the fittest. But what it really does is create a climate of fear, which is not conducive to creativity, innovation, or quality of life. As a matter of fact, the phrase "survival of the fittest" was never spoken by Charles Darwin. It was spoken by Herbert Spencer, a reactionary social thinker who corrupted Darwin's thinking to support his own reactionary social policies of denying help to the most vulnerable members of society-a proto-Gingrich, you might say. Darwin talked about natural selection, meaning that whoever is able to adapt to a changing environment is most likely to reproduce and be around tomorrow. It turns out that even the animal world tends to avoid competition because mutual aid is typically more successful for survival. That is not to say that competition doesn't exist there, but that collaborative mechanisms within and among species are more common than most of us believe.

One reason competition tends to backfire is its status as an extrinsic motivator. People are led to do a task so that something else will happen outside the task-the gold star or candy bar, merit pay, the status of winning, and other goodies that we dangle in front of people to get them to work harder or better. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, means being engaged in a task for the task's own sake. Schools can be set up, for example, so that tasks are interesting and engaging in their own right and even workplaces can move in that direction. Frederick Herzberg, a management theorist, said "if you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do." Providing a task that fully engages or engrosses people is a different kind of motivation than saying, "Here's what I'll give you if you jump through my hoops." Rewards per se tend to become counterproductive.

How does competition survive and get reproduced forever if it isn't an inevitable part of human nature? The answer is that well-meaning parents and teachers raise kids to beat other kids instead of raising them to question the desirability of a win/lose approach. It starts out at the youngest level where it's not about caring, nor even about learning. It's about winning.

As for why rewards and punishments, too, are so popular despite their ineffectiveness, we might note that they are easy. To dangle a goodie in front of people and say, "Do this and you'll get that," or "Do this or I'm going to do something to you"-which is the flip side-takes no time, no skill, no care, and no courage. To work with people, on the other hand, to help them become engaged, help them get excited, does take time and talent and care and courage. Rewards and punishments can work in the short run, but the more we use rewards or threaten punishment, the more we have to offer even bigger rewards and bigger punishments, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maybe the biggest reason that rewards and punishments are so pervasive is that they're instruments of control often preferred by people who feel a need to control others. I've noticed, as I've travelled and talked to many teachers and corporate managers around the country, that the people who really love systems of reward and incentive in a corporation or classroom, tend to be those who cling tightly to their own power over others. That's very evident when people are punishing others. But rewards are also controls-through seduction. When we offer stickers or candy bars to kids when they behave themselves or give them A's for reading a book or praise them-"Oh, what a good job, I'm so proud of you!"-these are often instruments by which we try to manipulate behavior.

It's hard to get kids intrinsically motivated, yet that's what we need to do if we want them not only to be able to read, but to read on their own time when there are no more A's, nobody around anymore to offer a patronizing pat on the head. We want kids to be excited by ideas, to be critical thinkers, to be curious and creative, but even successful students regard learning as a giant chore if it's something they've got to get through in order to get some reward.

The traditionalist who talks about excellence and higher standards and bottom-line results needs to take a hard look at things like test scores and grades. The great Brazilian educator Paolo Freire talked about the banker model of education where you deposit information in kids and then withdraw it on demand in tests. We need to move away from that to understand kids as active learners who work best when the teacher is on the side helping to facilitate the process of understanding, rather than in front giving them facts.

Some claim that we've done better than Russia has because we are competitive. But the Soviet Union was wiped out in part because of the enormous resources that had to be diverted for the military and the Cold War against the United States. That helped to bankrupt us on many levels, too. What a perfect example of how competition writ large turns everybody into losers!

The Soviet people's problem was not primarily that they lacked competition or reward; it was that people were largely unmotivated and had no say over their work-a lack of democracy, not lack of competition. The average person had no psychological investment in what he or she was doing. That accounts for massive failure. The next alarming question is: Might that be present in our own economic system as well?

There are many reasons, including our vast natural resources, why the United States has been relatively successful. One can argue that we have succeeded in spite of our obsession with winning, rather than because of it. One can also ask how successful we've actually been, given our enormous debt and the egregious maldistribution of resources that forces tens of millions to choose between feeding their families and paying their rent.

One would have to be naive to believe that compensation is decided on some objective notion of people's worth. There is an enormous inequity in how people are compensated by the same reward-the same carrot-and-stick system. If you think that the reward system works, there's something wrong when the guy at the top is making millions of dollars in stock option plans while the people at the bottom get T-shirts as rewards. That leads to another question: Are they worth it at the top? Who's making that determination? The Boards of Directors who pay CEOs these grotesque sums have typically bought into the whole process themselves and often are CEOs in other places.

People debate across the artificially narrowed spectrum of discussion in our political system about what our country, even our schools, can do to become more competitive. It seems to me that we're in trouble precisely because we're too competitive. The more we march under the banner of competitiveness, the more resources are transferred from those who don't have them to those who don't need them. Yet it's off the spectrum of discussion.

When economic entities work together and cooperate in our economic system, it's called "collusion" or "restraint of trade" because of our assumptions that profit is the point. (When kids work in the most effective way and learn together, it's called "cheating.") But in Sweden, there's a third cooperative way as an alternative to state-owned entities and private-owned entities. Some of the largest insurance companies, fuel-oil outfits, and housing outfits are owned either by the workers or the consumers, so in effect they keep the companies honest, not by setting them against each other so that they'll be driven out of business if their prices aren't low enough, but because they're kept democratic. Moving from a competitive to a cooperative economic system is the logical extension of democracy into the economic realm. But it's an uphill struggle to even introduce these concepts. People still use socialism as an epithet, not as an alternative to be taken seriously.

For alternatives to competition, we can explore cooperative learning in the classroom where kids spend time in pairs or small groups helping each other to understand. We can look at games people play over the weekend that are set up not as "win/lose" but involve overcoming an obstacle together so that everybody has a good time instead of trying to make each other fail as in most competitive sports. Families can change the way they work so that it's no longer about who can get into their pajamas fastest. Parents can ask why award assemblies teach kids to overcome each other when we could be helping them to celebrate together. People can ask-not whether we should give honorable mention in addition to first prizes-but why are we having competition at all?

The central message of competition that other people are potential obstacles to one's own success is both poisonous and unnecessary. You don't have to be a kindergarten teacher to see how human spirit and interest are killed by this manic race to be Number One. Even those who work with large corporations can understand that the more they are concerned about beating the competition, the less likely they are to reach organizational health and optimal arrangement of tasks. Yet our system not only fails to see the obvious but sanctions it. Until we recognize that winning and excellence are in many respects opposite, no president will ever say we've got to stop the competitiveness so we can become productive.

Alfie Kohn, who speaks widely on human behavior, social theory, and education, is the author of No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Houghton Mifflin, revised edition, paperback, $12.95) and Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, Praise and Other Bribes (Houghton Mifflin, paperback, $13.95).

Material for this article was excerpted and edited, with permission, from Jerry Brown's interview of Alfie Kohn on the "We The People" radio program.

OCT-NOV 97 -- N.C.Xpress -- Archives -- Electrons to the Editor