Speaking of Psychology: How competition drives our behavior, with Stephen Garcia, PhD

From classrooms to boardrooms, from sports to social media, we’re constantly sizing ourselves up against other people—and being sized up in return. Stephen Garcia, PhD, discusses what drives some people to be extremely competitive in their work, in relationships, and in life; which situations bring out the competitiveness in all of us; and how to handle the overly competitive people in your life.

Stephen Garcia, PhD, is a professor in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis. He is an expert on the psychology of competition and a scholar in the field of judgment and decision-making.

Kim Mills: Competition is everywhere. From classrooms to boardrooms, from sports to social media, we're constantly sizing ourselves up against other people—and being sized up in return. Sometimes that might drive us to work harder and perform better. Other times it could leave us anxious, discouraged or unwilling even to enter the race. Today we're going to talk to a psychologist who studies how competition shapes our behavior about what drives some people to be extremely competitive in their work, in relationships and in life.

Which situations bring out the competitiveness in us? How much does competition correlate with success? Is it necessary to have a strong competitive drive if you want to achieve big things? Do men and women differ in how they respond to competitive settings? I suspect many of us think it's possible to be too competitive—so what are the potential negative effects of competition and what's the best way to deal with overly competitive people in your life?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Stephen Garcia, a professor in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California Davis. Dr. Garcia's research focuses on the psychology of competition, especially the situational factors that amplify or diminish competitive behavior. His work has been published in leading journals across the behavioral sciences and covered by mainstream media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He's also the lead editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Competition. Dr. Garcia, thank you for joining me today.

Stephen Garcia, PhD: Thank you for inviting me.

Mills: So how do you define competition in your research?

Garcia: So in my own research, I use the lens of social comparison theory to understand competitive behavior in—basically whenever we anticipate that someone is going to outperform us or if we observe someone outperforming us, we're going to behave competitively to minimize the gap in performance.

Mills: Why are some people more competitive than others? What are some of the characteristics of their personalities and is there a competitive personality type?

Garcia: Yeah, so there's individual difference variables that capture competitive personalities, and basically people who are high in trait competitiveness will behave competitively, but there are other independent or individual differences that will also predict competitive behavior, such as the concern for social comparison. If one is concerned how they compare relative to others, they will also dispositionally be more inclined to behave competitively.

Mills: You study the situations that are likely to bring out anyone's competitive side or conversely diminish their desire to compete. What are some of those factors?

Garcia: So one of the factors that we've looked at is the number of competitors in the competition. So maybe conventional wisdom would suggest that having more competitors means that people are going to be even more competitive. But what we find is that more competitors can sometimes diminish the motivation to compete. So for example, in one of our studies, we would ask people to complete an easy quiz as fast as they could, and we would time that quiz—the amount of time it took. And so what we found was those people, those research participants that were told they were competing in a pool of 10 competitors finished the quiz significantly faster than those who were told they were competing in a pool of 100 competitors. And so again, the idea is when you have many competitors, you're just not as motivated to compete as when you have only a few. And I should mention too that we also told them that the top 10% in each pool would win a prize. And so the chances of winning were the same in both conditions.

Mills: What about a situation like the Boston Marathon, the New York City Marathon? I mean, there are lots of people there competing. Does that make you more or less competitive if you are one of the runners?

Garcia: So definitely in terms of those marathons, obviously some of them are more competitive marathons to even qualify for and be permitted to run. But all else being equal, what we're suggesting is that when people are running with people of similar ability as their own, wherever you are in that ability, if they're like you in ability, then the more people you're running with, the less competitive motivation you would feel, as opposed to only a few. And part of this goes back to social comparison theory. So when we think about competing, competition in a small group, it's easy for us to keep tabs on how we compare to let's say, eight other competitors in the small competition. But if we have 100 competitors in that competition, it's much more difficult, impossible to keep tabs in terms of how we stack up relative to every other single competitor. And so because we can't keep tabs anymore in those larger competitions, the motivation to compete goes down. Again, we sort of look at this through the lens of social comparison theory. That is social comparison is the engine behind the competitive motivation In this particular case,

Mills: Do people generally feel more competitive when they're pitted against friends or strangers? Does that make a difference?

Garcia: Yeah. So interestingly, there's been some established research by Abraham Tesser showing that when others outperform us, if we're close to them or have a close relationship with them, it can sometimes be a more competitive experience than if it's a stranger. So for example, I mean Abraham Tesser has looked at this in many ways, and what he found is that you can actually see that close relationships can sometimes be more competitive than relationships between strangers. And I think back in the day there was a song by Morrissey, and the title of his song was, We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful. And I think part of that captures the competitiveness that can happen between those we know versus those that we do not know.

Mills: What about competing against yourself? Is that enough of an incentive to drive people to great heights? I mean, speaking of marathons, say you just want to outdo your personal best in running? Or do we do better when we're competing against others?

Garcia: That's a good question. I would say that you may be able to meet the goal through either case, whether you're trying to do your personal best versus trying to best another competitor. And I would also add that it's probably the case that the healthier competition for many would be trying to just improve their own score as opposed to having it interpersonal and trying to beat someone else.

And part of this insight would come from what we know about mindsets. So Carol Dweck studied mindsets, and basically there's two different mindsets. One is a growth mindset where you just look at your own behavior and you're trying to grow. And so you might espouse competition as a way for you to grow in some particular task. Whereas a fixed mindset is more of the sensibility that however you perform it is very fixed and you can't really change it. And a lot of times those people with fixed mindsets are more inclined to socially compare themselves to others. And there are downstream consequences of that in terms of psychological wellbeing, for example. I mean, people with growth mindsets are better off psychologically than those who have fixed mindsets. And again, I think if you were to read Carol Dweck's book, she offers many colorful examples, sobering examples, of how the fixed mindset, which again I would say is more connected to social comparison, vis-a-vis someone else, could actually go down a bad path.

Mills: Do people tend to be competitive in all aspects of their lives, or is it more common say for somebody to—you're an athlete, so you're competitive when it comes to that, but when it comes to other parts of your life, you hang back a little bit. You don't care as much.

Garcia: So definitely people are more competitive in what they find to be self-relevant. So for example, if you play tennis, then you're going to be more competitive at tennis than another game like golf or something like that. So it is in these domains, which we see as being relevant, is where we exercise our competition. That said, it is possible to also be competitive in situations where it's really not that personally relevant. For example, just if you look at childhood games, for example, I think many of us might remember when we were children, people would say “first one to the tree is the coolest person in the world, or last one there is a rotten egg.” And in both of these cases, the children run. I mean, if you would say that with a group of adults and if they're able to run or mobilize their walker, I mean, you might have a similar kind of effect going on. So it's not like we're all trying to get to the tree and that's very self-relevant. I mean, it's not the conventional domain of competition, but I think it sort of illustrates how this competitiveness or the competitive spirit can be awakened even in ephemeral nonconsequential situations.

Mills: When we compete against someone who is better than us, does that tend to make us perform better or worse, or is there no effect?

Garcia: So definitely if you try to compete with someone who's better than you, I mean it would serve as a nice anchor for you to actually try to achieve that level. And in some ways, even people with growth mindsets, for example, even if they're not competing with other people per se, they might look to others as being exemplars on where they would like to go in terms of their trajectory. And so that would be another way where people are more inspired by high anchors. I mean, you could just think about—with whom would you prefer to play a game of tennis, someone who's worse than you or someone who's slightly better than you? If you play with the person slightly better than you, that's where you're really going to learn to improve your own game.

Mills: What makes a rivalry healthy? And conversely, what makes one unhealthy?

Garcia: In some rivalries, they're not built on a close, amicable, or respectful relationship. And when you do not have that kind of a rivalry, then you're going to see more untoward behaviors where you're going to see more unethical behaviors. So I mean, I always think about figure skating and how I think Tonya Harding was the one who broke the legs or injured the legs of Nancy Kerrigan, I believe. So, I mean, that was an example of a rivalry, and that wasn't necessarily a healthy rivalry. But there are rivalries where you can have rivals who actually do respect each other, and they might play a tough game with each other, but then once they're done with the game, that's it, they're able to engage in amicable relations with each other.

Mills: Is competitiveness innate in humans? I'm just wondering whether evolution might argue more strongly for cooperation versus competition when it comes to survival?

Garcia: I'm not like a evolutionary psychologist or a biologist, but I would definitely say that there's competitive processes, not only in humans, but also in primates, and also I believe even in cockroaches. So the reason why I say that is Bob Zajonc, many years ago he did this one study looking at social facilitation, and he had the cockroaches in a maze and basically the cockroaches, if they were by themselves versus with a few others, the cockroaches who were by themselves, I don't recall the exact measure, but they were slower to get where they needed to go compared to those that were amongst a few trying to get to probably a source of food.

The other thing that I might have for let's say a biologist or an arborist for example, is what does the distance between trees mean? And do the trees actually emit something if there's a tree that's growing too close to them or what can actually turn on or turn off competitive behavior, so to speak. From a tree’s perspective, I'm sure there's those dynamics that exist, I just don't know them.

Mills: And that depends on which way you're looking at it from, because you could say, that's also cooperative. I need my space. So you just have to grow over there a little bit and then we can both grow.

Garcia: Right? Exactly. Yes. Yeah.

Mills: Well, let's talk for a minute about gender as a factor. So do men and women differ in their willingness to compete or how they to competitive settings?

Garcia: Yeah, so there's been research, especially from behavioral economics, showing that in general, men would be more likely to enter a competitive situation such as a tournament, whereas women would prefer something that's less competitive or noncompetitive, such as a pay as you go rate. So there was a study that was done that showed that men prefer to enter a tournament-style competition versus get paid for a task based on a piece-rate method. And so that's one of the differences.

Another thing that would also differ is in terms of what we'd call entry decisions into competition. So there you might get the idea that women would shy away from competitions. And so my collaborator, Kathrin Hanek, led a study where we looked at how the gender of the competitor can also affect what size of competition they prefer to enter.

So in these studies that were led by Kathrin Hanek, we had two situations. We had a competition where there were many competitors, let's say a hundred competitors. And we had a situation where there was a competition with 10 competitors, and we gave men and women preferences in terms of which competition they would like to enter. And we held constant the expected value of winning. How likely is it that you would actually win? And what we found was that men gravitated toward larger competitions, whereas women gravitated toward smaller competitions, relatively speaking. And so again, Kathrin was the lead author here. And so what her theory suggested was that women feel more comfortable in smaller spaces or amongst fewer people rather than many. And that was part of the reason why they were gravitating toward the smaller competitions compared to the larger ones at greater rates than men were.

Mills: What about cultural differences? How do people in different countries or cultures respond to competition? Are they different from Americans? We tend to be very competitive in this country.

Garcia: So there was another paper that a former student led, Kaidi Wu in this case. And so what we did was we looked at how Chinese research participants would choose to enter a different competition compared to an American research participant. And basically we were looking at what's called the frog-pond effect. And that's the general idea that if given the choice to be the big frog in a small pond versus a small frog in a big pond, which would you prefer? And the conventional wisdom is that people prefer to be the big frog in a pond. And so the idea there is being the big frog, you're the big person and the small pond you might think of as being a lower status. And so you'd rather be in a situation where you're the big guy, number one, even if the broader group is lower status, compared to being a little guy in a high-status group.

And so basically that is what we found in this research is that Americans tended to prefer to be the big frog in the small pond. However, eastern Asians and Chinese participants in our sample were more inclined for the opposite. They preferred to be maybe an average size fish in a large pond, in the more what you would call a more high-status pond. And they did not want to necessarily be the big fish in the small pond.

Mills: How much does competitiveness correlate with success? Do you have to be extremely competitive to achieve big things in the world?

Garcia: I mean, some people are able to achieve without much effort, and some people are able to achieve just based on strategic thinking, and other people have to work hard to become successful. And I think among that group, I think being competitive and having a competitive spirit, a healthy competitive spirit can help propel you, can help advance you. Of course it becomes deleterious if you see every little competition as being the end-all of everything. And it's not so long as you just approach it as this is just kind of like one battle in a broader war. If you want to use that metaphor—I think that would be another more healthy way to look at it.

But yes, I do think that among some people, competitiveness can help people achieve greater things. I mean, we even see this in terms of group processes or intergroup relations. So even let's say success among nations, that rivalry that you would experience between one country versus another, I mean, that has helped, I would think, help foster innovation and ingenuity, et cetera. And so you can think about that on many different levels, not only just an individual trying to become more innovative, but even the groups to which they belong and the broader identities that they relate to, et cetera. I mean, that could also be a factor of competition and achievement

Mills: It seems that competitiveness would have to be just one of a number of important factors. So when it comes to achieving big things, I mean, if you think about a lot of people who say, go to Hollywood or New York and they want to be actors, and how many times do you have to be shot down turned when you try out for pieces before you finally get your big break?

Garcia: Right. No, and I think that would be an example where the concept of grit would be helpful. Perhaps just going ahead and biting the bullet, persevering and just putting more effort in it, not letting the headwinds bother you, just go against the headwinds. And so over time, that persistence could help you attain more than if you had no grit, so to speak.

Mills: Oh, we have to talk to Angela Duckworth, I guess.

Garcia: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, she's the grit person.

Mills: Is it possible to be too competitive? I mean, what are the downsides of competitiveness?

Garcia: Yeah, so I mean, it's definitely possible to be too competitive, especially because there can be some dark areas or dark consequences of being super competitive yet not making your goal. So you might have attacks on your self-esteem. It may give you the delusion that you have no, if you don't achieve some kind of goal that you were trying to achieve. So I think there is a dark side to being too competitive.

Mills: We end up with no friends.

Garcia: Yeah, you're right. Yeah. And also you can think of it as being—stealing your joy. So for example, one thing that I always think about is sometimes if I'm in an elevator, for example, staying at a fancy hotel—a subsidized fancy hotel, but if I'm staying at a hotel for a conference or something like that, and usually these are high rises. If I'm staying on the 22nd floor and then someone comes in the elevator and then they say to me, Oh, can you hit floor 25 please? And it's like, if you're really competitive, sometimes I am that way. I think like, Oh, man, they're just trying to one-up me and show their glory that they're staying on the 25th floor and I'm only on the 22nd floor. So really that could be an example where it's just competitiveness that is stealing your joy. And of course the view is just as good from the 22nd floor as the 25th or whatever.

Mills: But it's really a killer if that's the club level and you're not on it.

Garcia: Oh, there you go. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Holy mackerel.

Mills: Now, you've also studied something called the status symbol paradox. The disconnect between what people think will help them make friends and what actually does. How does that relate to competition?

Garcia: Yeah, so sometimes I think what happens is when we're trying to make new friends, we're almost in a competitive mindset in terms of what's going to attract new friends. So imagine you recently graduated from college and you move to a new town. And so what we did was we asked research participants this scenario, and if you're moving to a new town, suppose you could buy a new car—and money wasn't an issue. You could either buy a Honda Civic or a Honda Accord, I believe, or you could buy a BMW 3 series. Which would you buy to make new friends in this new community?

Well, when we ask people, they're more inclined to buy the BMW because they think the BMW is going to help them make more close friends. But on the flip side, when we ask people, research participants in the would-be friend condition, we say, Oh, imagine there's a recent college grad that just moved to the community and they pulled up in a Honda, or another group of participants we said they pulled up in A BMW, and what we found was that people wanted to become friends with the person driving the Honda. They didn't want to become friends with the person driving the BMW.

And so it's kind of—in our effort to seek new friends, we're using status to make us seem more appealing in this world of making friends, but we're actually repelling would-be friends. They don't want to be friends with the person who is signaling status. So in some ways, that's kind of an error in the way people think about making close friends. It's not a competition where you need to show all the status that you have. People actually like neutral, non-status signaling friends.

Mills: Do you have any advice for dealing with an overly competitive friend or even a relative in your life?

Garcia: Yeah, so I sometimes think about my Uncle Ernie. My Uncle Ernie would always ask me how I was doing. Then he would always bring up my Cousin John. My cousin, John Ruiz, is a psychology professor at University of Arizona. And so whenever I would see Uncle Ernie, he would be like, Oh, how are you doing? And I'm doing okay. And then he would tell me all about Cousin John. Oh, well, Cousin John, he's got another big grant that he recently got, or Cousin John, he's going back to DC to be on another grant panel or something like that. I think it was called National Science Foundation. And so whatever I would see Uncle Ernie would be like, Oh my gosh, what am I going to do?

And so I mean, maybe you could still steer the conversation in a different direction and you could just change the subject, but from that Uncle Ernie experience, I mean, it struck me that even a third party, by asking and comparing you to someone else, they could kind of mint a rivalry even where it didn't previously exist. But I think taking advantage of competitive situations and making them more pleasant experiences—so it might be watching games together, watching football together, watching baseball together, or it might be organizing some kind of a game in the backyard if you can, or something like that. So actually making some positive social aspect out of that competitive spirit that a family member may have.

Mills: But then you have to be prepared to lose, right?

Garcia: Then you'd have to be prepared to lose. And so yeah, that would be the difficult part for sure.

Mills: How did you get interested in this subject? Are you a competitive guy?

Garcia: When I was writing up my dissertation, I had an opportunity to go for a year at what it was called, the Program on—it is called the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. So I was finishing up my PhD at Princeton, and while there I met my good friend and collaborator, Avishalom Tor, and Avishalom Tor was a law and economics person. So he was in the Harvard like SJD program, which is kind of like a PhD version of a JD. Anyway, so when I was describing to him my dissertation, I mean, it was actually Avishalom that sort of said, Oh, well, you're studying basically the psychology of competition, in so many words, he suggested that.

And it was interesting because in social psychology, really there had been a lull in the study of competitive behavior and competition. And so Avishalom Tor, who knew psychology and economics, he was able to use that language. And I think that language and also that mutual interest in this kind of work, the study of the psychology of competition was something that led us to sort of what we think is hopefully helped reignite the study of the psychology of competition. Because for years, for decades, it was not really the focus in social psychology, even though social psychology and even Festinger himself when developing social comparison theory was talking specifically about competitive behavior. And so that's how this research program grew from that initial conversation way back then.

Mills: And just to wrap up, what are you working on now? What are the big questions you're trying to answer?

Garcia: So one of the things we're looking at now is we're looking at what are some situational factors that can affect one's willingness to tolerate inequality? And so in follow up work to our N-effect research, which was what we would call where the more competitors, the lower the motivation to compete, we have a recent paper looking at what we're calling N-Equality—N standing for number of payoff recipients—and inequality. And so what we find is that when people are paying others, they feel more pressure to pay them equally when there are only a few than when there are many. So for example, let's say if they're having an estate and they're trying to determine how much money they're going to leave their children, if they only have three kids, there's probably going to be more pressure to pay those three children equally than if they had, let's say, well, 30 kids. If you have 30 kids, then it doesn't really matter—

Mills: Must be Elon Musk—

Garcia: Right? Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah. So I mean three versus 30, that works with our study paradigm. But yeah, but that's kind of the idea. Or if you're at work, if you're part of a larger versus a smaller department, that also can affect the variance in salary. So we looked at faculty salaries at the University of Texas system, and we found at the department level, on average, the more faculty members in a department, the higher the variance in pay compared to the smaller the department, the narrower the variance in pay. Now that real world data is very much confounded, but we again just recently published a whole bunch of experiments showing this effect, and that's what we call the N-Equality effect.

Mills: Well, Dr. Garcia, I want to thank you for joining me today. This was really interesting and fun.

Garcia: Yeah, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very grateful.

Mills:  You can find previous episodes of  Speaking of Psychology  on our website at  speakingofpsychology.org  or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at  speakingofpsychology@apa.org .  Speaking of Psychology  is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.