My son, Malcolm, has told me for many years that he hates competition. Recently, he made the varsity tennis team at his high school, but claims he only joined to make some new friends and have fun playing, not to win games and compete fiercely.
His father, also a tennis player, is extremely competitive. When he plays, I get the impression he’d like to destroy his opponent.
I’m not sure if Malcolm’s lack of competitive drive is a reaction against his dad (probably) or just the way he was born. It got me wondering whether the competitive drive is something learned or innate.
This is, as you might imagine, an age-old question, and I certainly won’t find the answer in this column, but I’m guessing many parents out there have noticed the competitive drive, or lack thereof, in their own children and wondered about the trait from time to time.
There is much debate about whether competition is learned or a natural trait. Freud thought it innate and said it began early with a competitive drive to gain the attention of our parents.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead, on the other hand, posited that the competitive drive was learned. In 1937, she published a book titled “Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples.” It was based on her studies of several societies that did not value competition.
The Zuni Indians of Arizona, for example, valued cooperation much more than competition. They held an annual footrace, which would suggest a competitive streak, but the winner was never publicly acknowledged. It was as if they were just running for the fun of it, not to determine a winner. In fact, if one person won several times in a row, he or she was excluded from the next year’s race.
Mead’s conclusion, after studying dozens of similarly inclined cultures, was that competitiveness is culturally created, not something innate to human behavior.
You would think Charles Darwin would fall on the side of competition being innate, but that’s not necessarily true. In “The Origin of Species” he asserted that the struggles described in his book should be viewed as metaphors and that “survival of the fittest” could be achieved by dependence and cooperation and not necessarily fighting and competing for food and shelter.
Competition is something valued highly by our culture, and it’s not limited to sporting events. So many key aspects of our lives are rife with competition, from competing for the best grades to getting into the best colleges to contending for the most plum jobs.
The competitive drive is also a trait considered more masculine than feminine.
My husband recently described to me the extreme contrast between the male and female tennis leagues during practice at the courts. He said the men curse extravagantly when they miss shots, or ridicule each other for making mistakes (in a jovial way). But when he walked by women playing, he heard things like “Nice try” and “Great shot,” and he had to laugh at how differently the two groups react to the same situations.
Of course, this isn’t true across the board. I think my daughter has more competitive spirit than my son, at least when playing Monopoly. But as a culture, we typically expect men to be more competitive than women.
Should I worry about my son’s lack of competitive drive? Will it hinder him in a society that so deeply values winning?
He can step out of this race to the top and choose not to compete. He can cooperate instead of trying to win, but is there a chance that route will end in failure?
Or maybe I’m overlaying my Gen X perspective on top of his Generation Z viewpoint. Perhaps the world is changing in ways I don’t yet understand. After all, problems are now being solved by crowd sourcing, and social media is being harnessed to help others by gathering like-minded people who may never have found each other in the days before Twitter and Facebook.
Look at the millions of women and men around the world who came together to march the day after the inauguration in support of the rights of women and other disenfranchised groups. That was a symbol of unity and cooperation if I ever saw one.
We are made strong by helping each other, and that has nothing to do with competition. So I think I will just let my son be the way that he is – a kind, sensitive person who has no real interest in competing – and trust that he is in step with other good things happening in the world. And hopefully he will win a couple of tennis matches too, just for good measure.
Contact the writer: hskyler@ocregister.comTwitter: @heatherskyler
