No Contest by Alfie Kohn

participation and far fewer problems than some had anticipated. 1 I am discouraged by recent news reports about elaborate “Little Miss” beauty contests for three- to six-year-old girls 2 and pressure-filled interscholastic academic contests that reduce learning to a matter of preparing for victory at a quiz show. 3
    I am heartened when I see dissidents starting to raise questions about the value of competition in publications as diverse as a psychoanalytic journal (1986) 4 and magazines for guitar players (1989), 5 music teachers (1990), 6 and photographers (1992). 7 I am discouraged by the fact that most of the popular press, notably magazines intended for women, continues to treat competition as inevitable, desirable, amusing, or all three. Not every such article is as egregious as one recent quiz for teenage girls (“Compete, Don’t Retreat!”), bursting with cheerful exclamation points, which awards more points to readers who know enough to put their desire to win ahead of their loyalty to friends. 8 In magazines for parents, articles often advise against putting too much pressure on children to win. Such cautions, however, are accompanied by a de rigueur concession that, “of course,” competition in moderation is appropriate and productive. *
    I am appalled when I read that forty-nine teenagers from one school district have been hospitalized for depression, suicide attempts, or substance abuse, all apparently connected to the stress caused by academic competition. (The school administrators responded by citing the “failure to teach adolescents coping skills.” If, by way of comparison, a factory’s polluting smokestacks had sent nearby residents to the hospital, presumably the factory manager would not have the audacity to attribute the problem to a failure to buy respirators.) 9 I am horrified when I read that some of the people who were killed when a plane crashed and burned on a runway in Los Angeles might have lived were it not for two men standing in front of the exit door, competing over who would get out first. 10 It is hard to take any consolation in such tragedy save for the faint hope that some people may begin to understand that competition by its very nature is a problem.
    The unwillingness to acknowledge this is, I am convinced, the chief obstacle to freeing ourselves from the quicksand. People proudly tell me stories of someone they know who didn’t care whether he lost, or of some competitive game in which participants were exhorted not to place too much importance on the outcome. These are steps in the right direction, and I am pleased to hear about them. But they do nothing to challenge the underlying structure of mutually exclusive goal attainment, which is the ultimate cause of the problems detailed in the preceding pages. This is often difficult to grasp in a culture that can imagine change only at the level of individual attitudes and behaviors. If next week we Americans suddenly began to recognize the destructive consequences of competition, books would start to appear in the stores with titles like “Ten Steps to a Less Competitive You.”
    That competition itself may be the problem is rarely considered, least of all in the context of what goes on in the workplace. 11 Nevertheless, research over the last few years continues to remind us of the importance of structural factors. In one study, people led to expect that they were going to be working cooperatively with strangers responded empathically when those strangers received a reward or punishment. But those who thought they would be competing against the others responded
counterempathically
—that is, smiling at their discomfort and grimacing at their good fortune. 12 Another study showed how people put into a situation of team competition tended to reject friendly overtures from people on the other side and came to view the members of that group as an undifferentiated They. 13
    In chapter