No Contest Read Free

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.
    We sometimes assume that working toward a goal and setting standards for oneself can take place only if we compete against others. This is simply false. One can both accomplish a task and measure one’s progress in the absence of competition. A weightlifter may try to press ten pounds more than he did yesterday, for example. This is sometimes referred to as “competing with oneself,” which seems to me a rather unhelpful and even misleading phrase. A comparison of performance with one’s own previous record or with objective standards is in no way an instance of competition and it should not be confused with it.
Competition
is fundamentally an interactive word, like
kissing,
and it stretches the term beyond usefulness to speak of competing with oneself. Moreover, such sloppy usage is sometimes employed in order to argue that competition is either inevitable or benign: since nobody loses when you try to beat your own best time, and since this is a kind of competition, then competition is really not so bad. This, of course, is just a semantic trick rather than a substantive defense of competition.
    The third alternative, cooperation, will play a more important role in the pages that follow. The word refers to an arrangement that is not merely noncompetitive but requires us to work together in order to achieve our goals. Structural cooperation means that we have to coordinate our efforts because I can succeed only if you succeed, and vice versa. Reward is based on collective performance. Thus, a cooperative classroom is not simply one in which students sit together or talk with each other or even share materials. It means that successful completion of a task depends on each student and therefore that each has an incentive to want the other(s) to succeed.
    When we think about cooperation at all, we tend to associate the concept with fuzzy-minded idealism or, at best, to see it as workable only in a very small number of situations. This may result from confusing cooperation with altruism. It is not at all true that competition is more successful because it relies on the tendency to “look out for number one” while cooperation assumes that we primarily want to help each other. Structural cooperation defies the usual egoism/altruism dichotomy. It sets things up so that by helping you I am helping myself at the same time. Even if my motive initially may have been