How Tech Can Channel Human Competitiveness For Good
Life may be a competition, but why should anyone have to lose?
If Earth were visited by aliens who knew nothing about the human race, they would soon pick up on the fact that we thrive on competition.
Take Exhibit A: In a dark Las Vegas convention hall spinning with disco lights, an exuberant MC starts hyping the crowd. Broadcast cameras pan across a sea of spectators wildly cheering on the professional grocery baggers fighting for glory in the Great American Sport of Bagging. As the competitors (bagthletes) race to fit together canned goods, milk, eggs and other crushables, they are judged on speed, weight distribution, bag-building technique, style, appearance and attitude. No self-checkout amateur has ever won that $10,000 grand prize.
It’s not enough for us to determine who’s the best at bagging groceries. We want to know who in the world can throw a mobile phone the furthest. Who can fold the world’s best paper plane. Who can sit atop eight-foot-tall ice blocks the longest. Humans have been one-upping each other since time immemorial, so it was inevitable our love for competition would bleed into our tech products and apps.
We use activity trackers to connect to communities where we outstep, outsleep and outshine other fitness enthusiasts. Educational apps let us challenge friends to battles of wit. Our hyper-connected world gives competition—whether in the form of points, badges, or leaderboards — a prominent role in the technological tools we use to improve health, education and business outcomes.
This omnipresence of competition brings into focus basic questions about its influence on learning and human behavior: Is competition always a good thing? Is it good for everyone? Does it actually improve motivation and engagement? And if benefits exist, are there design principles we can follow to more effectively channel human competitiveness towards positive behavioral outcomes?
Numerous studies examining competition from the physiological, cognitive and psychological perspectives draw a similar conclusion: Like most things, competition can be done well or done badly. This is unsurprising, given the multitude of ways you can structure it. The results of competition, positive or negative, depend on the mechanics used (eg. whether competition is team-based, between individuals, between user and computer, or against oneself), as well as the characteristics of individual participants (eg. personal abilities, self-efficacy, motivations and interests).
On the positive side, an element of social comparison can help us map potential areas of improvement. Occasional failures, like losing in a fair competition, are part of the process of reflection and self-improvement. Adding social competitive features can result in increased enjoyment and interest, which in turn fosters persistence, effort, academic motivation and cognitive engagement. There is evidence to suggest that combining social interaction with gamified rewards helps improve the desire to exercise.
However, excessive competitive activities can negatively impact learning and behavior by increasing anxiety and consequently impeding task performance. Additionally, competition can actually harm motivation when it associates external rewards with a task someone already finds interesting. In those cases, imposing incentives can shift someone’s motivations from being intrinsic (i.e. learning because they want to) to extrinsic (i.e. learning simply to earn a reward).
Competition, in short, is a double-edged sword. Learners with high self-efficacy (i.e. who believe they can do well) tend to perform better under competitive conditions, and their performance further strengthens that confidence. The flipside? Those with low self-efficacy (i.e. who believe they will do poorly) tend to underperform in competitions, particularly when they compete against higher-performing learners. A competition structured to grow positive interpersonal relationships and foster team work is empowering, while poorly designed competitions that isolate individuals and focus incentives exclusively around ‘winning’ can decrease intrinsic motivation.
How then do we best capture the benefits of competition for learning and behavior change? We can start by eliminating, or at the very least mitigating, the potential negative effects described above. This is where technology can play a helpful role, especially when used to implement systems of competition that are difficult to realize in traditional learning or work settings.
For instance, we can exploit the unique capabilities afforded by technology to facilitate competition-based learning that caters to diverse learning styles and self-efficacy levels. In one interesting case, researchers used an algorithm to evaluate and match every student with an opponent of similar ability, thus ‘equalizing’ the opportunity of performing well in a competition. By moderating differences between more-able and less-able students, students were given challenges appropriate to their individual abilities, and as a result were more willing to invest efforts into improving themselves.
Technology also opens up the option of choice. Research shows that people tend to respond negatively to the idea of “mandatory fun”, and that competitive leaderboards are more effective when individuals can choose whether or not to participate. In a traditional classroom setting, it’s unlikely an educator would have the time and resources to gamify lessons or activities for some students, but not others. Digital learning platforms and mobile technology make individualized instruction and optional participation in social competition more feasible.
Collaboration and competition aren’t mutually exclusive — in fact, intergroup competition leads individuals to enjoy an activity more than pure cooperation and pure competition. To build cohesion within a group while avoiding the negative effects of a competitive environment, sometimes it is better to compete as a team against other teams of strangers, such as an office in another city. Widely accessible platforms and mobile devices (equipped with powerful sensing, processing, storage, and display capacities) broaden the scope for intergroup competition, allowing people to achieve success both in concert with others on their team and on an individual basis within the team.
Competition can be a great medium through which to motivate people towards positive behaviors, and technology offers certain advantages that help enhance its most constructive aspects. These include the ability to optimize the core experience of competition to cater to individual characteristics and preferences, as well as the ability to integrate mechanisms that strike a healthy balance between competition and cooperation. Creators of digital interventions that aim to improve learning, health or productivity outcomes should appeal to established theories of intrinsic motivation, and avoid incorporating competition for competition’s sake alone.
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Cogniss Magazine is published by Cogniss, a platform for building Human Transformation apps — apps that use applied neuroscience and psychology to drive better learning, health and behavior change outcomes.
