Competition can often be
motivating. The history of discovery and
innovation is filled with stories of people who were spurred on by the prospect
that someone else would beat them to the goal.
Watson, Crick, and Franklin were concerned that other groups were also
closing in on the chemical structure of genes. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha
Gray were rivals in the development of the telephone (and indeed, Bell’s patent
application preceded Gray’s by a matter of hours).
Yet, in ordinary life, social
comparisons can also be de-motivating. To
understand why, it is important to start with the core principle that people’s
engagement with a task depends on two factors:
whether the goal is important for them to achieve and whether they
believe they can achieve it.
If you compare yourself to someone
else who is just a little better than you are, you may be energized to improve
and catch up with them. In this case,
competition increases your sense that the goal can be achieved, and provides
some incentive to increase the importance of the goal. But, if you compare yourself to someone who
is significantly better than you are, you may feel like no matter how hard you
work you will never measure up to their example. Now, the gap between you and your goal seems
impossible to bridge.
A paper in the March, 2016 issue
of Psychological Science
by Todd Rogers and Avi Feller provided evidence for the downside of
competition.
In one study, they examined over
5,000 participants who were students in a Massive Open Online Course
(MOOC). Many MOOCs have the students
give peer evaluations to each others’ papers in order to make the workload
manageable for the instructors. In this
MOOC, students wrote a paper about mid-semester and then gave evaluations to at
least three papers written by their peers.
The measure of interest was
whether students finished the course and ultimately received credit for
it. The quality of essays a student
evaluated affected whether they finished the course. About 68% of students who evaluated essays of
average quality finished the course.
But, only 45% of the students who evaluated excellent essays finished
the class. That is, when students read
excellent examples of other student performance (and thus had a chance to
compare themselves to other students who were performing well), they were less
motivated to finish the class than if they read average examples of other
students’ essays.
As a way of understanding the size
of this effect, the researchers also looked at the effect of the grade students
got on their essay. Overall, 93% of
students who got a perfect store on their essay went on to finish the class,
while 75% of students who got an average score finished the class. That means that seeing examples of excellent
work (as opposed to average work) was about as demotivating to students as
getting an average score on their own essay (as opposed to an excellent score). It also means that the worse you did on your
own essay, the more that you could be made to feel like you could not possibly
succeed in the class.
The researchers also did a second
study in which they manipulated the essays people evaluated experimentally and
got similar results.
These findings demonstrate that
comparing yourself to excellent performers can sap your motivation. You have probably experienced something like
this before. When learning to play a
musical instrument, hearing a real virtuoso may lead you to think you will
never be any good at all. Similarly,
starting at a new gym can be an exercise in despair when you see toned gym rats
go through their workout.
That doesn’t mean that you have to
fall prey to the perils of social comparison. Ask yourself why you are working
toward this goal in the first place? It is rare that your goal is to be the
best in the world at something, and so there is no need to be threatened by the
excellent performance of another person.
If you go to the gym to get in shape, the only person you need to be
better than is the person you were before you started working out.
Also, it is important to remember
that anyone who is good at something has put in a lot of effort to get to that
point. When you compare yourself to others
, it is easy to discount the work that it took for them to reach their current
level of performance. If you do compare yourself to people who are better than
you, try to imagine how good they were at the same point in their own practice.
I started playing the saxophone
about 17 years ago when I was in my mid-30s.
Living in Austin, Texas, I am surrounded by great musicians. At first, I
was intimidated by their ability, and hearing the number of amazing players in
town made me doubt my commitment to take up the instrument. Eventually, though, I realized that my goal
was not to quit my job and play the sax, but to have an artistic outlet. Eventually, I focused on the goal that if I
played for 10 years, I wouldn’t be horrible.
Now, I enjoy hearing my peers who are more skilled than I am, because it
gives me a sense of new things I might eventually learn to do. And I did reach my goal—I now play in bands in town.
