Competition and cooperation are often viewed as antithetical, and collaboration is seen as the better, more moral of the two virtues. Social commentators bemoan the male competitive drive as the source of many societal ills, claiming that it leads to cheating and harm, and arguing we’d all be better off if men acted more like women with regards to being cooperative.
But what psychological, sociological, and anthropological research shows is that, far from being the antithesis of cooperation and morality, competition can actually foster both.
First, competition requires competitors to cooperate with each other. You can’t have a basketball game unless everyone in the game knows, understands, and agrees to follow the rules. And what’s true for basketball goes for any other competitive domain. Individual businesses, and the marketplace as a whole, couldn’t operate unless people followed sets of written and unspoken rules — unless they cooperated while competing.
The cooperation that’s necessary for individuals or teams to engage in a competition also fosters a sense of morality. Most individuals want a “good game” — it’s not enjoyable to win if you cheat, and hard to lose with grace if the contest is rigged. For that reason, competition can cultivate morality as participants self-police, and explore and debate what’s right and wrong.
To watch the collaborative power of competition, just watch children get together before a game to establish the rules. I remember when I was a kid and played Capture the Flag in our neighborhood, we’d spend ten minutes going over the ground rules. No parents were involved — we did this all by ourselves. Once the rules were set, it was game on, and the competition was fierce. This collaborative element of competition is a big reason why play is so important for children.
Or take the art of roughhousing. The idea that competition can foster morality is actually one of the reasons child psychologists encourage dads to engage in rough and tumble play with their kids. When we roughhouse with our sons and daughters, they learn boundaries and the difference between right and wrong. If they start hitting hard, aiming below the belt, or becoming malicious, you can reprimand them and then show by example what’s appropriate roughhousing behavior. In this way, competition can be a way to train our moral intelligence.
Competition also fosters cooperation by requiring individuals on the same team to work with each other. Some teams do have a show-boat or a ball-hog who tries to steal the spotlight and be a one-man show. But the best teams are typically those whose members work together — individuals who are willing to unselfishly sacrifice sometimes in order to set up their teammates, and the entire team, for success. Through this kind of cooperation, teammates build tight, loyal relationships with each other.
In fact, competition is arguably the primary way males bond with one another. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger first made this observation in his seminal book Men in Groups. For Tiger, male bonding is intimately entwined with male aggression and competition. According to his research, men typically form tight bonds “in terms of either a pre-existent object of aggression, or a concocted one.” Men draw close together when they have some other group against which to compete or some difficult goal to achieve together.
Sports teams and military units are prime examples of the way in which competing with external groups/teams/challenges, bonds men together. In the military, a common refrain amongst soldiers is that while they may have gone to war to fight for their country, they stayed to fight for their brothers. Each man in a unit has to intimately cooperate and give their best in order to win the battle against the enemy, and protect the lives of their comrades. With sports competitions, though the stakes aren’t as high, men often recall their teammates as the best friends they ever had.
All of this is to say, that far from being antithetical to cooperation, competition can in fact breed the keenest kind of cooperation there is. It’s the catalyst for deep friendships and moral behavior. If society wants to develop men who look out for people other than themselves, and know how to be loyal and unselfish, it should encourage more competition, not less.
Now of course, there are cases where competition is so fierce, that people end up throwing cooperation out the window, trampling over others, and doing unethical things in order to get ahead. But the problem in such cases isn’t competition itself, but a culture in which honor, integrity, and fair play haven’t been inculcated. Competition doesn’t make people do immoral things; it’s a neutral tool, which, as just discussed above, can actually bring out the best in people. Competition doesn’t breed corruption, a corrupt culture breeds corrupt competition.
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