[SERIES] Competition: The Fuel for Greatness Part II: How to Get the Most Out of Competition - Chapter 4: Keep the Competition Close

Competing against others can help us summon reserves we didn’t think we had, but researchers have found that the competition has to be close in order to reap these performance-enhancing benefits. If the people you’re competing against are lapping you, you have a tendency to just give up. This effect is particularly pronounced in men.

The U.S. Air Force Academy learned this lesson a few years ago when they conducted an experiment involving the class of 2010. They had noticed that cadets with lower grades improved their grades if they socialized and spent time with cadets with higher GPAs. So they decided to see if they could reduce the first-year dropout rates of the lowest-performing incoming cadets (students with the lowest SAT and high school GPAs) in the class of 2010 by assigning them to squadrons with the highest-performing incoming cadets (students with the best SAT and GPAs). For their control, they created units that were filled exclusively with average students. They expected to see the lowest-performing cadets start improving from rubbing shoulders with the highest-performing cadets. But that’s not what happened. The lowest-performing students started doing significantly worse. What’s more, the average students in the control group saw a dramatic improvement in their grades. What was going on?

Humans are very conscious of their status. If we’re always comparing ourselves and competing with people who are way ahead of us in some domain, we get fatigued by the constant status defeat that occurs. This is what happened in the mixed low/high Academy group. The gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing cadets was so large that the low-performing students stopped using the high performers as a reference point for their own performance, and started self-segregating. The low-performing students started only hanging out, eating, and studying with other low-performing students as a way to protect their psyche. But what about the squadrons of average-performing cadets? Why did they improve? Well, the competition was so close between all of them, that they had to make a lot of effort to distinguish themselves even a little from the pack. Close competition pushed the middle-of-the-pack students to up their game.

Researchers studying poor students who get accepted into prestigious charter schools through a lottery have noticed a similar trend of lower-performing students doing worse when competing and comparing themselves with much higher-performing students. 

What’s more, the effect is acuter in boys than in girls.

Poor girls who are accepted into elite charter schools typically thrive. Their grades improve significantly, and their chances of attending college after graduation go up. Most boys, on the other hand, flounder. Their grades go down, and their risk of dropping out goes up. However, when the researchers looked at the boys who had lost the charter school lottery and had to go to an easier, less academically rigorous school, they noticed that their academic performance and standardized test scores went up.
The researchers concluded that boys do better when competition and status comparisons are close. Status-conscious males have a tendency to throw in the towel if it seems impossible to win a competition. Men would rather be the big fish in a small pond, than a small fish in a big pond. Women, who are generally less status-conscious than men, aren’t affected by large discrepancies in ability or status between them and their peers.

In other words, that motivational poster in your grade school classroom was wrong; if you aim for the moon, you won’t end up among the stars. You might not get off the ground at all.
To get the most out of competition, you have to compete with those who are similar to you in ability. Buddies, associates, and opponents who sometimes beat you, and who you sometimes beat. It pays to have a (possibly quite friendly) archnemesis. If you’re a rank novice, don’t try to compete with the high-performers right off the bat. It will just demoralize you. Have some humility, seek out folks on the same level as you are, and use them as your pacesetters. Your performance will improve little by little, and before you know it, you’ll be hanging with the big dogs.