If you were to say, ”Tennis, anyone?” in the vicinity of Alfie Kohn, he would not reply. If you`re thinking about challenging him to a footrace, save your breath. Kohn also would refrain from checkers, chess, arm-wrestling,
”creative tension” in the workplace and comparative grading in the classroom. Kohn might even oppose Mom`s apple pie if she entered it in the Pillsbury Bakeoff.
Kohn hasn`t always been so reluctant to pit himself against others. As a lad growing up in Miami Beach, Alfie dominated the spelling-bee circuit. He led his high school debate team into the national finals.
Even then, however, Kohn was edging toward his current position. For example, the local National Football League franchise had reached the height of its powers when he was a boy, but Alfie refused to get caught up in Dolphin mania. He already disliked athletics, and even his debating triumphs left him feeling slightly wan.
”There would be a rush of adrenalin, a temporary high that comes from victory, and then there would be a letdown,” he recalled the other day. ”In 10th grade, I placed second in the state in extemporaneous speaking, and I was miserable for a week. The congratulations that my parents gave me didn`t help, because my coach had made it clear that there`s a winner–and then there`s everybody else.”
When Alfie Kohn, now age 28, began to argue strongly against all forms of competition a few years ago, he ran into detractors. ”Sure, you`re already on top,” some of those people scoffed, ”and now you tell the rest of us to stop playing the game.” Others took an opposite tack: ”You must be a failure, so naturally you want to drag the rest of us down with you.”
Alfie Kohn just couldn`t win.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based scholar certainly has proven he can hack it. He earned degrees from Brown University and the University of Chicago, majoring in psychology and philosophy. He has lectured at Tufts and taught at Phillips Andover Academy. His articles have appeared in some two dozen publications, including The Nation, Humanist and Psychology Today. He resides in a communal house, where he said the residents share no specific discipline or belief but manage to live in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual support. Kohn does not see why his personal life, successful or otherwise, should give his critics ammunition.
”I think people should simply grapple with the points I`m raising, rather than grapple with me,” he said.
Kohn visited Chicago during a promotion tour designed to sell copies of a book he wrote. Remaining consistent with his ideals, Kohn hopes the book will sell–but not to the detriment of other books. People buying his book should also buy the book they would have bought if his didn`t exist, unless, of course, their alternate selection would have been one of those hundreds of how-to tracts that show us how to win the rat race.
The author understands that he is up against formidable odds, even within his own field: ”The writer competes against other writers for the opportunity to be published; then he must compete within the publishing house for attention and money so that his book will be adequately publicized and distributed; then he struggles for attention and sales, reviews and prizes.” So we can see why Kohn feels mixed emotions as he goes around the country talking about ”No Contest” (Houghton Mifflin, $16.95), a volume that–with its overwhelming footnotes and dual subtitles (”The Case Against
Competition” and ”Why we lose in our race to win”)–attempts to crush the notion that people are meant to vie with one another.
His message is simple, and he documents it with scores of studies conducted over the years by educators, behaviorists and social scientists.
”Competiton is not a part of human nature, but it exists because we`ve been trained to do it,” Kohn concluded. ”It`s not more productive in the workplace or the classroom. It`s not the only way to have fun. It`s destructive psychologically. And it poisons our relationships with other people.”
Kohn has become quite picky on the subject, but he is content, at the moment, merely to state the problem, rather than prescribe all-encompassing solutions.
”I see my job as offering a critique of competition and a broad hint that working together, cooperating, makes a lot more sense,” he said. ”Now we can use our ingenuity to devise specific ways to implement the cooperative agenda, instead of wasting our talents on devising new ways to triumph over one another.”
During his research, Kohn uncovered a 1954 study by Columbia University sociologist Peter Blau, who set up two groups of interviewers in an employment agency. One group competed fiercely to fill job openings. The other worked cooperatively. Instead of posting job notifications publicly, as they were supposed to do, members of the first group hoarded them. Those in the second group routinely told each other about vacancies, and ended up filling many more jobs.
In a project conducted by another sociologist, Robert Helmreich of the University of Texas, researchers matched the achievements of 103 scientists with such personality traits as orientation toward work, affinity for challenges and their degree of competitive attitude. Those whose work was cited most often by colleagues scored high on the work and challenge scale but low on competitiveness. The noncompetitive ones not only accomplished more, but they tended to enjoy a higher status in the eyes of their peers.
”If we are set up to be adversaries, we will be hostile toward one another,” Kohn said. ”We will feel contempt and jealousy and outright aggression.”
In Kohn`s analysis, competition divides into two major subcategories, structural and intentional.
”Structural competition has to do with the arrangement that requires winners or losers,” he said. ”I succeed only if you fail. It`s mutually exclusive goal attainment.”
American society, as everyone knows, seethes with structural competition. As Kohn points out, ”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.` ”
Intentional competition springs from individuals, people who deliberately try to be No. 1, because their internal makeup or their analysis of a situation drives them in that direction.
”When I began this project five years ago, I thought the two were in perfect balance,” Kohn recalled. ”As I read more about the subject and began to write, it became increasingly clear to me that structural competition is the more important of the two. Telling people to stop caring who wins is pointless, so long as we are forced into an institution where success requires us to defeat someone else.”
Several studies of child behavior have convinced Kohn that, when given a choice, children would rather cooperate than compete. When everyone in a classroom is put to work on a solution, all of the pupils feel relaxed and happy, and they come up with the answer more readily than in situations where one child will try to respond to the teacher while the others are waving their hands and shouting, ”I know, I know!”
Kohn believes children readily would take to the sort of games devised by Terry Orlick, a behaviorist at the University of Ottawa. Orlick came up with a noncompetitive version of musical chairs, the conventional version of which Kohn describes as ”a prototype of artificial scarcity.”
Instead of making the children fight for a diminishing number of chairs until one winner emerges from a group of crestfallen losers, Orlick would have all of the contestants try to find room on the chairs that remain. ”The final result,” Kohn writes, ”is a group of giggling children crowded onto a single chair.”
In volleyball, participants would move to the other side of the net after hitting a shot. Their skill would be tested, but the ”we” versus ”they”
aspect of the game would disappear. In cooperative Scrabble, to name one more example, the players would work together, constructing words to fit the available spaces.
Games do serve as a convenient metaphor and would, perhaps, be the easiest aspect of competitive society to change. Professional sports, business, politics and education will require major rehabilitation before they get on a noncompetitive footing. But even when he discusses simple pastimes, Kohn said, he meets considerable resistance.
”People look at me cockeyed when I even raise the possibility of noncompetitive games. They ask, `How can it be a game if there are no winners and losers?` I point out that a game is fun because one overcomes an obstacle, but the obstacle doesn`t have to be another person or team. It can be something intrinsic to the task itself, such as beating the clock.”
A society hooked on major sports might have difficulty swallowing that idea. When he arrived in Chicago, Kohn learned that Bear coach Mike Ditka had distributed sports shirts to all his Super Bowl champs. The shirts were inscribed, ”Are you satisfied?”
”The correct answer, presumably, would be `No,` ” Kohn surmised with a scowl. ”This, of course, is a recipe for neuroticism and violence. And while the message is not quite that blatant, I think your average business person or student often hears the same thing.
”You win the Super Bowl and there`s always next year. You finally win, and there`s somebody waiting to kick you off the mountain. We remain fearful of losing and unsatisfied with winning. What competition produces is a need to compete. It`s like a drug. We build a tolerance to it. So you need more and more competition to shore up the shaky self-esteem that gives rise to it. We compete to try to prove to ourselves that we are good–by beating others. But it doesn`t work. Furthermore, instead of abandoning this fruitless strategy for feeling good about ourselves, we return to it again and again, ever unsatisfied. It`s like drinking salt water when you`re thirsty. By competing, we can never leave the psychological needs that give rise to competition.”
If Kohn were to deliver the above as a halftime speech at a Bears game, somebody suggested, he might find himself undergoing open-heart surgery without benefit of anesthesia.
”That`s right,” Kohn allowed. ”I would say that to them from a distance, if at all.”
