Competition Inherent

Competition Inherent
Negative
By Landon Frame

Competition is not inherent. The father of modern research on competition in social psychology, Morton Deutsch, of Columbia University, wrote in 1973 that “it would be unreasonable to assume there is an innately determined human tendency for everyone to be ‘top dog’.” Sports psychologists Thomas Tutko and William Burns agreed basing their opinion on considerable experience with athletes of all ages saying: “Competition is a learned phenomenon… people are not born with a motivation to win or to be competitive. We inherent a potential for a degree of activity, and we have the instinct to survive. But the will to win comes through training and the influences of one’s family and environment. Games like hide and seek are not inherently built into people but learned from ones environment and friends. Children are taught that games “must have winner and a loser”. Peter and Brigitte Berger wrote “its only young children that wish, wistfully that ‘everyone should win; they soon learn that this is imposable’- in American society, that is, there are other societies in which children actually play games in which ‘everyone wins’.” It is because we learn that everyone can’t win (or so we’re taught) that we feel the need to compete. Games become “more fun” when we are competing with each other. We start to feel this need to win and no longer feel the need to help others win. We care less about others feelings and more of our own. Alfie Kohn says in his book No Contest (in which he look at competition and then argues in favor of cooperation) “We currently train our children to compete.”