Is competition bad for wellbeing?
If you asked the question, ‘is competition good or bad?’, you’d get just about as many responses as the number of people you ask. When it comes to performance, certainly, competition is a double-edged sword. Sometimes, we thrive in competitive settings — what we might call a clutch performance — and other times, we perform absolutely terribly — also called choking. We hear about such performances in the news all the time, whether it be the unfortunate loss of the English National Football Team at the European Championships this year, or the surprising victory of the Italian Men’s 4x100 Sprint Relay Team at the Tokyo Olympics. Then of course, other than particularly good and bad performances, there’s everything in between, not to mention that we perform differently each time we’re in a competition.
So, suffice to say and as far as the outcome goes, competition is neither bad nor good.
What else is there, then?
Yet, performance isn’t all there is to it. There’s a whole load of literature around what happens during a clutch or a choke, but I’ll talk about those in another article. Instead, what I’d like to shed a bit of light on is how competition affects our wellbeing instead. What do I mean by wellbeing? Well, wellbeing is a rather tricky concept to define. It more or less has to do with how positively we feel about ourselves and our environment, and how we perceive our ‘vitality.’ By and large, wellbeing hinges on whether our psychological needs (if you remember from a previous article, these are autonomy, competence, and motivation) are satisfied or not, though practically speaking — and this is my own opinion — it’s a bit more than that. Wellbeing is both a physical and psychological phenomenon that manifests itself on many levels of our conscious and subconscious functioning. That said, the satisfaction of these three needs is certainly a pre-requisite.
Either way, feeling well is mighty great, but you might be wondering if there’s anything else. Fortunately for us, there is! When we feel well, we’re more likely to persist in a behaviour; so, for example, if you enjoy going to running races, you are more likely to keep doing so, and you’re also more likely to keep doing the running itself, too[1]. What more, wellbeing predicts prosocial behaviours. Basically, when we feel better, we’re more likely to act nice towards others, and we’re less likely to be mean[2].
So, if competition were to improve our wellbeing, it would improve a whole host of other things in our life as well.
Turning back to our good old friend, the Self-Determination Theory, a boatload of research has examined competition, primarily in sport and exercise settings (though the findings can be applied to any other field, really)[3]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the general consensus is that it’s not really competition, per se, that affects our wellbeing, but rather, how competition is delivered[4]. Without attempting to be exhaustive, there are two aspects of competition that are particularly well-researched that I’d like to talk about: informational versus controlling competitive environments, and individual versus team competition.
Informational versus controlling environments
I have briefly alluded to this before, but the way we perceive our environment is incredibly important to our wellbeing. According to Ryan and Deci, if the environment we’re in is supportive and emphasizes effort with encouraging feedback — what we’d call an informational environment — we’re more likely to enjoy what we’re doing. On the flipside, if our environment emphasizes winning at all costs and punishes bad performances, it’s unlikely that we’ll enjoy competing. Personally, I know I do better in fencing matches when I don’t need to focus on winning, but on improving myself.
An example of a study in the field is from Schneider and colleagues, who examined goal orientations in university hockey players. They found that those who were more task-oriented — that is, focused on bettering their own performance — enjoyed playing the sport more than those who were ego-oriented, focusing on external frames of reference for their performance[5]. Similarly, Adie and colleagues found that these goal orientations predicted wellbeing and need satisfaction in elite youth football players over the course of two competitive seasons[6]. The downside of these studies, of course, is that they didn’t really manipulate the competitive environment of their participants, so they couldn’t directly measure the direct effects of competition on these wellbeing and enjoyment questionnaires.
There is one study that did manipulate the competitive setting (and I’m not kidding, this does seem to be the only one) by Standage and colleagues, who made a bunch of university students play a rough equivalent of Dance Dance Revolution. They were either told to focus on winning no matter what, and that their performance would then be posted to a leaderboard for everyone to see, or that they should focus on doing their best and improving throughout the task, and not concentrate on winning. Those who were instructed to focus on winning felt significantly worse after the task, with lower scores on psychological need satisfaction and vitality[7].
So, if we focus on putting in our best effort during a competition, rather than winning, it seems like we’ll feel better overall.
Individual versus team competition
When we compete, we can do so alone or in a team. Almost all sports have some element of both, if you think about it — bearing in mind that individual and team competitions might look markedly different in sports like archery and handball; after all, even in a team competition, archers shoot one-by-one, and the most individualistic handball gets is when penalties come into play. That said, it’s fairly well-documented that team competition generally helps our wellbeing more than individual competition does — I reckon this is because when we compete in a team, it satisfies our need for relatedness, so even if we’re not winning, at least we’re not losing alone.
For example, in the Standage and colleagues study, the participants either danced alone or in pairs. Those who danced in pairs reported higher wellbeing and need satisfaction scores, and had more positive feelings compared to those dancing alone. What more, the effect was present regardless of whether the teams won or not. In another study, Cooke and colleagues had participants compete in a hand grip endurance task either individually, or in teams of two or four. Not only did participants in the team conditions put in more effort, they also enjoyed the task more and felt less anxious during the task[8]. All in al, it looks like there is some compelling evidence that if we’re competing, we should do it in teams, rather than alone.
So, if you want to enter a running race, it’s probably a good idea to get your mates together and make it a group outing.
A word of warning
Of course, what I’ve said above is not definite. It’s okay to focus on winning somewhat, especially if you’re in a situation when winning would be personally important to you. I imagine one does not simply win the Olympics by disregarding the gold medal that is just about hovering in the imaginary distance. And of course, there are times when being in a team is more stressful than competing alone. In team competition, you’re not only responsible for your own performance; you’re also contributing to your team’s overall result, and this can place an immense amount of pressure on you. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t like being the anchor in my fencing team; at the end of the day, it all falls on me to make it to those coveted 45 points.
That being said, the overall message is still the same. It’s not worth demonizing competition, because sometimes, it not only improves our performance, but our motivation and wellbeing, too. Similarly, it would be unwise to globally glorify competitive settings, because in a lot of cases and under overly pressuring circumstances, it just serves to make us anxious and lower our wellbeing.
All in all, as long as it’s done with our best effort in mind and it provides some sort of social opportunity, competition is not such a bad thing, after all.
References
- Kang, S., Lee, K., & Kwon, S. (2020). Basic psychological needs, exercise intention and sport commitment as predictors of recreational sport participants’ exercise adherence. Psychology & health, 35(8), 916–932.
- Delrue, J., Vansteenkiste, M., Mouratidis, A., Gevaert, K., Broek, G. V., & Haerens, L. (2017). A game-to-game investigation of the relation between need-supportive and need-thwarting coaching and moral behavior in soccer. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 31, 1–10.
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Publications.
- Reeve, J., & Deci, E. L. (1996). Elements of the competitive situation that affect intrinsic motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(1), 24–33.
- Schneider, R., Harrington, M., & Tobar, D. (2017). Goal orientation and how a task or ego mentality can affect the enjoyment for college hockey players. College Student Journal, 51(1), 57–62.
- Adie, J. W., Duda, J. L., & Ntoumanis, N. (2010). Achievement goals, competition appraisals, and the well-and ill-being of elite youth soccer players over two competitive seasons. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 32(4), 555–579.
- Standage, M., Duda, J. L., & Pensgaard, A. M. (2005). The effect of competitive outcome and task-involving, ego-involving, and cooperative structures on the psychological well-being of individuals engaged in a co-ordination task: A self-determination approach. Motivation and Emotion, 29(1), 41–68.
- Cooke, A., Kavussanu, M., McIntyre, D., & Ring, C. (2013). The effects of individual and team competitions on performance, emotions, and effort. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 35(2), 132–143.
