Alfie Kohn: Thriving Beyond Competition

Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer in education, parenting, and human behavior. The author of fourteen books and hundreds of articles, he is a proponent of progressive education and a strong critic of competition and rewards. Kohn has been described by Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.”

Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/Jqcw_0v8ooE

Transcript

AMY: [00:00:20.8] Alfie Kohn is an influential author and speaker focused on education, parenting, and motivation. 

His 14 books include Unconditional Parenting, The Homework Myth, and my personal favorite, Punished by Rewards. 

Alfie is an unabashed critic of competition, arguing that pitting people against each other is inherently destructive.

Alfie: The evidence from psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, economics, education, leisure studies, and so on all driving me to a very surprising and heretical conclusion, which is that competition isn't just bad news because we do [00:01:00] it badly or do it to excess. It is inherently counterproductive so that the very phrase, healthy competition, is a contradiction in terms.

AMY: Join us as we dive into cooperative gaming, intrinsic motivation, and healthy alternatives to competition with the legendary Alfie Kohn. 

Welcome to our game thinking academy today we have Alfie Kohn who is a educational pioneer who has reached and touched many lives and continues to through his work and his books and his speaking and his writing.

So welcome Alfie. Thank you so much for being here. 

Alfie: Glad to be here. 

AMY: I wanna start with a brief overview of some of your background and then really get into cooperative games, which is what you've written about. It's what our work revolves around and really wanna get your point of view.

[00:02:00] So before we get there, you’ve written extensively about education and you're very controversial, very influential. What was it that created that spark and drove you to now devote your life to this? Were there experiences you had as a younger person that just really shaped you in the fire?

Alfie: Uh no. There's nothing autobiographical I can point to.

And I'm more interested in talking about the ideas anyway. 

I think I would say in general that whenever I see solid evidence and good values pointing in one direction and see widespread practice going in a different direction, it pisses me off. And I know there's another book coming soon, so I narrow that gap and invite people back to their best values and show them, what the risk.

Search capes. And that ends up challenging a lot of conventional practice at home at school, at work at play. 

AMY: So [00:03:00] you're very research driven, data driven. You wanna see evidence and facts. It sounds like, 

Alfie: Yeah, if it's good evidence, although, a lot of people claim studies show it turns out that  they're pushing the values underground.

And plus, often not looking, critically and carefully at the studies themselves, but yes. 

AMY: So, when did you first become aware of the difference between competitive games and cooperative games? The main topic we're gonna talk about today, how did you get clear on, wow, these are really different things.

Alfie: Well, I had experience as a camper and a summer camper and then camp counselor and became increasingly discomforted by what I saw when people were set against each other. And I briefly considered writing a thesis on this, on the topic of why it is, especially in our culture, that we are set against other people so that the [00:04:00] idea of excellence comes to be confused with victory. In other words, we are given the message that other people are potential obstacles to your success.

Meaning, that we can reach our goals, only if other people don't and that's the heart of competition by definition, mutually exclusive goal attainment. I can't succeed unless other people fail and that's not a part of life. That's a very contrived arrangement that turns out to be counterproductive as I learned. And that became the topic of my first book, which is called no contest. That looks at a, a range of different academic disciplines. The evidence from psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, economics, education, leisure studies, and so on all driving me to a very [00:05:00] surprising and heretical conclusion, which is that competition isn't just bad news because we do it badly or do it to excess. It is inherently counterproductive so that the very phrase, healthy competition, I was eventually persuaded. Although I didn't go in believing that a contradiction in terms. And one of the chapters in that book dealt specifically with play and games. and then I ended up writing more about that in an addendum to the book that was published. Some years later, 

I moved on to write about other topics, having to do with the destructive effects of rewards, even when no competition is involved, dealing with topics of altruism and empathy, and then parenting, 

But uh, this thread has continued throughout my entire career of realizing that it never makes sense to pit people against each other. and that even better than the absence of competition is the affirmative presence of [00:06:00] cooperation. After all, those are two different things.

In competition. I can succeed only if you fail.

In a individualistic non-competitive environment. I succeed regardless of what the hell you do. 

And in pure cooperation, I can succeed only if you succeed too, because our fate are, we think course them together. 

And that's why I've been interested to see how that can play out among other arenas, in terms of having fun, where games require us to in an allegedly playful fashion, overcome some obstacle to reach a goal.

It's just that we are raised to assume that obstacle has to be other people. Whereas in fact, it can be something built into the task itself or trying to achieve this task in a way before the clock runs out or something else where everyone on the field is pulling together. And it's not us against them anymore than it's me against [00:07:00] you.

AMY: Right. So, in gaming, as you know, there are many, many competitive games, but there's also a wide world and a growing world of cooperative games. They absolutely exist. One of the challenges is it's often more difficult to create and run a cooperative game than a competitive game. So, we're always looking for models of effective cooperative games and effective cooperative activities.

As you've spoken to this subject, as you've worked with teachers, parents, groups, whatever, what are some models you've seen that work at different scales for effective cooperative activities and games? 

Alfie: I guess it's pretty easy to kind of look at your favorite cooperative games. And then kind of work backwards, reverse engineer, the [00:08:00] principles that create the challenge for the task that doesn't involve having to triumph over somebody else, which is you're right.

The easier, because it's the default, model. That's the easiest way to create a challenge is you and I have to have to wrestle at it. And one of us has to get there first or do, do something better, but there are other models that are present in offering elements of a task at a, incrementally. So, one has to continue to integrate new information.

I'm remembering a cooperative board game I played that had to do with, it was a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which that was done very carefully. There was another one that you, you must know of. I think it was called pandemic all too timely.

But I would imagine that a number of other board games for children for example, created by the great, little Canadian company called Family Pastimes, which has been around for [00:09:00] almost 50 years now, or outdoor games for kids and adults such as those created by or collected by a guy named Terry Orick, uh also Canadian by the way, that if you look at the way, a lot of those games are structured, you could figure out, hey, the same principle could be used to create, some kind of, videogame know.

For, for example, let, let's take the first game most of us Americans were ever exposed to at birthday parties in which, n children are desperately scrambling to, to fit on n-1 chairs. When the music stops, you take away a chair. Each time you start the music up again. Somebody's out, you do it again, out, again, out, out, out, out until at the end, you've got one kid, seated, happy the winner, everybody else excluded from play, unhappy losers. That's how you learn to have fun in America. 

So, Terry Orla comes along and says, why don't we take a continue to take away a chair [00:10:00] each time? But now the goal is for all the players to fit on a diminishing number of seats until at the end, everybody is giggling and squishing and trying to figure out how to hold on so everybody can sit.

You've got the, the artificial scarcity here in a way, but you've got a challenge where now the goal is for everybody to figure out how everyone can succeed, which becomes in this game increasingly difficult to do because the space is shrinking. That's the challenge, but we have to cooperate to make this work.

I'll give you another, an outdoor game, bump and scoot volleyball. You hit the, you hit the volleyball over the net, and you jump, you run under the net and join the other team. And that's what keeps happening. the goal is to not drop the ball, keep it in the air until everybody has changed teams.

At least once at the end, you know, who won, you know, who can tell it's the question no longer has any meaning because the teams [00:11:00] are fluid. Also, people are too busy having fun to worry about who won, which is interesting in its own. Right? I like to say until you've played a cooperative game, you really don't appreciate how much fun competition isn't, but notice that, that, that, that bump and scoot volleyball approach is very different from the model of cooperative musical chairs.

There, it's not that the task is becoming increasingly difficult because of some feature of the objective environment it's that the teams are being reshuffled. And there are other ways to do that too. In other games, every participant must make a defined contribution, you know, or everybody's gotta try to figure this out in a specified amount of time.

There are many different models that are all cooperative. It just means that you have the wherewithal and the insight to begin by saying, let's figure out ways to create challenge that don't involve pitting people against each other. 

So, one of the things that you wrote is [00:12:00] that recreation is a socialization tool that prepares children for adult roles.

AMY: The recreation is competitive. This offers a kind of apprenticeship for life in corporate capitalism, where people are regarded as potential obstacles to one's own success.

So as parents, if you speak to us as parents or grandparents, you know, or aunties and uncles, people that interact with kids, what are some ways that we can embody cooperation with our kids that gets beyond the, hey you get a gold star if you do your chores.

Alfie: One of the reasons that competition turns out to be counterproductive is that it's not good for psychological health. If you are constantly thinking I'm only as good as my last victory, that is a recipe for neurosis and the research shows that when you make kids compete, it undermines their self-esteem.

The second reason that [00:13:00] competition is counter product. Is that it is destructive to our relationships, because we end up envying winners and being contemptuous of losers and being skeptical about just about everybody holding them in arm’s length. Because even if you're not my rival today, you could be tomorrow.

And so, research shows not surprisingly that people are less, morally sophisticated, less helpful, less likely to imagine the way the world looks from someone else's point of view when they are put in competitive environments, it's not just about attitudes and dispositions of individuals. It's about structures.

You take friendly, happy, moral people, and you set them in a competitive environment, and they look neurotic and seditious and vicious and so on. They tend to cheat, become more aggressive, not because that's the kind of person they are, therefore not a problem that could be fixed by telling them to be good sports. but because of the systemic features [00:14:00] of being put in a competitive environment.

The third thing that's wrong with competition in general, that, and this is the part that's surprised even me when I started writing my book is that it's counterproductive in a very practical sense. People tend to do their best work when they don't have to worry about other people stepping on their faces or being distracted by having to step on other people's faces. Competition undermines excellence. And the more challenging the tasks such as being inventive, higher order thinking creativity, the worst, the effect of competition.

Now, why is that true? One reason competition tends to backfire is because it doesn't allow us to cooperate, which turns out to be very effective at most tasks because all of us are smarter than any of us. 

But another reason that competition turns out to be counterproductive in terms of the effects in terms of achievement is because of its status as an extrinsic motivator, a [00:15:00] doggy biscuit, do this, and you'll get that where now the point is not to code or to paint, you know, or to spell or whatever it is now, the point is to win.

And it turns out that the gold stars, so to speak, the extrinsic inducement is not limited to competition. And that's an important distinction. So, if I say only the best kid gets a gold star or some other, you know, a candy bar, whatever it is, that's a competition and an extrinsic motivator.

It's like adding arsenic to strychnine. But if I say everybody who does X who reaches this level of achievement can get a gold star or an a in a classroom. Now we've moved one step forward by getting rid of competition. But we are still dealing with, with doggie biscuits, with extrinsic motivators, we haven't gone [00:16:00] far enough.

So, grading on a curve is the worst thing to do grading, not on a curve where everybody can get is not competitive, but it's still bad news because it's an extrinsic motivator, best of all is offering assessment. That is not an extrinsic motivator.

As parents, we need to be mindful of all of this stuff, right?

That means we don't even say things that we thought were innocuous. You know, like who's the best little girl in the whole wide world, which teaches that you're in a competition against other girls, you know, or to say, okay, kids who can get into their pajamas fastest, which is a race it's not innocuous.

Now your siblings are people you triumph over and you start to learn your siblings and maybe your classmates and other people in general are not potential friends and allies. They are potential rivals and so on. It means that we as parents have to take an [00:17:00] active role in minimizing the presence of competition in our home life, but also look for alternative structures on Saturdays and Sundays, and to work with our kids' teachers, to make sure that they are not falling prey to competition, which is our state religion, and that they realize just how much damage is being done. When kids have to compete when, when they are in spelling bees and awards, assemblies, and so on. 

And while minimizing the competitive ugliness of competitive sports is certainly a good thing not getting carried away. We need to create alternative recreational models like cooperative, outdoor games, you know, coming together and, creating interest groups with other people in our community to offer purely cooperative games, [00:18:00] you know, or like the ion who had created all those decades ago found when he did a study that most kids who say they like sports, which are typically the kids who are good at it are only enjoying it because they don't make an informed choice. Having never been exposed to cooperative games. And when he taught them cooperative games, as well as the usual, you know, war minus the shooting as George Orwell referred to sports of hockey and football and baseball and basketball and soccer, almost all the boys and all of the girls preferred the cooperative games once they knew there was an alternative.

So that's the best thing in terms of recreation we can do as parents, not just say, hey, let's not keep score with five years old or, you know, let's celebrate all the kids and give 'em all trophies and not make a big deal about winning. Yeah. That's a tiny step forward. What we can [00:19:00] really do to help them is to provide alternative forms of recreation so that when they're doing something competitive later, and there'll be plenty of that in our culture, they can say, this is not the only way to do things. This is not the only way to have fun. And in fact, it isn't as much fun cause I've seen what it's like to play cooperatively. 

So, using your resources perhaps for, for video games, and other resources like family, times board games. And outdoor fun. You know, that's completely cooperative.

We raise a generation that's not only healthier, has better relationships, happier, more productive, but also one that realizes the idea that competition is just human nature is false propaganda designed to keep us reproducing ways of being with each other. That really are not ideal. 

AMY: Why do you think cooperative games aren't more widely used if they're [00:20:00] so much better? 

Alfie: That could be asked about competition and cooperation in general, why isn't cooperative learning?

You know, the default in most classrooms, why would we ever set people against each other in the workplace, given that it turns out the most effective approach, in workplaces for adults too, is not only to cooperate within groups, but to cooperate rather than compete among groups. So often, we talk about teamwork, but we take away with one hand what we give with the other, by setting the groups against each other, you know?

AMY: And I think, why do you think that is? Like, why do we default to that? 

Alfie: First of all, because even suboptimal, even dysfunctional approaches can continue forever. If you're socialized from birth belief that it's valuable or inevitable or both, there are lots of things that continue, even though it's not because it's human nature, part of it is just because it reproduces [00:21:00] itself.

Second, the more you compete, the more you're in a better position to win in the future another possibility is that people just have not been invited to understand the research, just, demonstrating that competition.

Isn't just ineffective, but simply counterproductive. We tend to believe because we like this middle of the road approach. That sounds more reasonable. Well, you know, they don't wanna get carried away and make kids compete like crazy and do it too early. But if you do some competition, you don't get carried away. You do it in a way that's reasonable, then it can be innocuous and even productive. 

Frankly that's what I used to think until I looked at the research and realized that competition is inherently destructive. For most people, that's a mind-blowing possibility and also a very unsettling one because it calls into question the way we were raised and taught.

That leads to a different answer to your question, which is it's really difficult [00:22:00] to consider the possibility that a lot of my own life and my own childhood was based on a myth. And so, we would rather perpetuate the status quo rather than ask deep unsettling questions about our society, our family, and what we've been doing.

So, I think there are probably other reasons, historical reasons I think for some people it's theological and economic. I think a lot of who are wedded to an economic system or a set of religious beliefs where competition plays a critical role, whatever the reason that it continues despite not being particularly good news.

And this is why when I wrote my book, No Contest, I made a point of debunking the myth that it's just human nature at the very start. So, we couldn't just shrug our shoulders and say, well, oh, your research showing that competition is ineffective. You know, that's interesting, but there's nothing much you can do about it, [00:23:00] cuz we're just (com) competitive by it's just the way nature works.

It's just the way life is. So, I use many different discipline, (re) research. So we are faced with the real question: If it's not inevitable, is it desirable? And if it's not desirable, then we've gotta damn well do something about it rather than just take. And this is yet another answer to your question.

One reason to just believe it. We can't do anything about it so that it continues is because it asks a lot less of us when we believe that this is just the way life is it, it sounds nice in theory to be cooperative, but your, your ideas are utopian or unrealistic. This is a profoundly conservative view, posing as realism, which is very effective at shutting down change.

AMY: So are there cultures that you know of that, have more cooperation in their founding mythology and in the games they teach their children?

Alfie: [00:24:00] Uh I haven't focused specifically on games, but I gathered that that is true. And some of the early anthropological research in the 20th century found some cultures that apparently are devoid of any competition at all, not only in their games, but in how they produce and distribute resources, how they teach their children and so on.

And that's really a, that is the ultimate rebuttal to the claim that it's part of human nature is that there's some cultures that have managed to do completely without competition. Margaret Mead found in fact that the extent to which a culture is competitive or cooperative, had nothing to do with objective scarcity of land or food or other resources.

In fact, in many cultures, non-industrialized cultures, if stuff was scarce, they said we can't afford to compete. We have to work together. So, the choice of whether a culture is more is competitive or not is a function of sort of social myths as you put it. It will be hard to find a culture that is more competitive than the United States, [00:25:00] which is the Reductio ad absurdum of this view, that, that, you can't succeed in life without, without triumphing over others and doing it to children, even when they're young.

There's like no, no activity that is too important or too trivial for us to turn it into a contest. You know, and this is something I write about in my book is example after example of stuff that, you know, it's one thing with football, for example, or tennis, where you can't play the game, unless you try to beat somebody.

So, you need to find a different game. If you wanna just have fun and not just beat people, but it's even more sad in a way when we take activities like running, you know, or singing or, or skiing or swimming, or coding. And we gratuitously turn them into a contest where you set people against each other, even though there's no necessary reason why the activity should be that way.

Well, so that's the low hanging fruit. Quit it, stop doing that, you know? And then [00:26:00] yes, turn to other cultures as well as to other sources within our culture, for more ideas about how we create games. And we do that in part because of that quote, you read, at the beginning, mm-hmm, not only is it, are we happier and healthier and more productive without competition, but competition is a profound socializing agent, that raises kids to assume, this is what life is.

And this is the way business has to be organized. And this is the way you have to raise your kids. And a lot of people persist at this because they have literally never had the idea, you know, raised with them that. This is not inevitable. it doesn't, it doesn't have to be that way. So that's why I like to have the kind of core of games.

Not only because they're fun and useful, and challenging in their own right. But because their very existence reminds people that the competitive approach is just one approach. Not the only one. And not the ideal one. 

AMY: I wanna just [00:27:00] give you an opportunity to tell us what you're doing these days.

If there's anything coming up that you're excited about or that you'd like to point us to. 

Alfie: No, no major projects, but thanks for the opportunity. I'm, I'm happy to point people to a lot of the work that I've already done. My website, which is just my name, alfiekohn.org has information about all my books, couple of videos.

And it also has hundreds of articles and blog posts on many different topics, particularly having to do with education and parenting, but also on other topics having to do with human behavior. 

AMY: Absolutely. We've already shared it with our community, and we will link that and other, direct links to your books, which have been just a great resource in our show notes.

So are there any other thoughts in terms of everyone listening, who wants to lean into cooperation wants to lean into this? Any other thoughts to leave us with? Just to let us walk out of here with [00:28:00] something (ch) to chew on. 

Alfie: I guess the, the two takeaways I would emphasize one is it's not just a matter of doing less of a bad thing but finding that some things are bad inherently and need to be questioned for what they are, asking the radical questions.

The one questions of the root and the other and related takeaway I would mention is it's not just a matter of your personal competitiveness or cooperativeness and trying to change attitudes or mindsets or orientations but making change in the structures. But the structure doesn't necessarily mean waiting until our entire society has undergone a revolution and been completely transformed because the structural aspect can be true of what these 20 kids are doing right now on a field or what happens in this classroom. Those are structural changes we can begin to make right now, even understanding that, that systemic transformation is ultimately more important than just [00:29:00] transforming our own attitudes about things.

AMY: That's fantastic. That's an inspiring place to leave. I really appreciate your time Alfie.

Alfie: Sure. Thanks so much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.

AMY: You have a great day. 

Alfie: You too. Bye bye.