It once sounded so appealing – and you still hear it in nostalgic conversations: competition in the classroom would bring out the best in pupils. But a new large-scale study with students in Chile suggests otherwise.
A promise with lasting effects
In this experiment, students from disadvantaged backgrounds were promised guaranteed access to university if they ranked in the top 15% of their school. It sounds like a fair way to expand opportunities. But in practice, it created two years of fierce internal competition within schools. And the results? Not only in the short term, but even four years later, those young people were less prosocial. They were less willing to help, to trust, or to cooperate. This was not only towards their ‘former rivals’, but in broader social relationships as well.
What we risk losing
In other words, competition at school can leave lasting marks on how young people interact with others. Prosociality – trust, altruism, reciprocity – turns out to be a character trait that is partly shaped during adolescence. One that is sensitive to context. If you make that context structurally competitive, the likelihood that young people will later be inclined to help others decreases.
This sits uneasily. Because those prosocial skills are essential, not only for living together, but also for success in the labour market and for well-being more generally. The authors of the study (Kosse and colleagues) reflect on alternatives. They suggest shifting competition from the individual to the collective level. For example, not ranking within schools, but using a regional benchmark, or rewarding schools as a whole might encourage collaboration within them. But perhaps the bigger question is: is competition really the best way to realise high expectations?
High expectations without rivalry
We know from other research that setting clear and ambitious goals can also work without competition, provided pupils receive the proper support. Imagine a culture where the central focus is not comparing yourself to others, but rather the shared ambition to improve. High expectations, combined with structure, feedback and trust, can stimulate achievement just as well (if not better). This can be achieved without eroding prosociality.
And maybe that’s the key lesson here: education is always about more than marks and entrance exams. Alongside the crucial work of learning, it’s about the kind of people we want to shape. Perhaps the most valuable form of competition is, in the end, the one with yourself – and not with others.
Abstract of the study:
We present the first causal evidence on the persistent impact of enduring competition on prosociality. Inspired by the literature on tournaments within firms, which shows that competitive compensation schemes reduce cooperation in the short-run, we explore if enduring exposure to a competitive environment persistently attenuates prosociality. Based on a large-scale randomized intervention in the education context, we find lower levels of prosociality for students who just experienced a 2-year competition period. 4-year follow-up data indicate that the effect persists and generalizes, suggesting a change in traits and not only in behavior.
