No Contest Read Online Free PDF Page A

friendly terms with competitors, but the fact that their interests are inversely related to one’s own predisposes each side to view the other with hostility. It is possible to be a “good sport,” but even this runs counter to the competitive imperative.
    Let us consider a concrete illustration of how a structure can elicit particular behaviors. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University conducted a novel experiment on the effects of imprisonment by choosing 21 male college students to take on the roles of guards and inmates in a very realistic “prison” created in the basement of the psychology building. The 21 subjects were selected from a group of 75 volunteers precisely on the basis of their normality: they were stable and scored in the middle range of a personality profile. Equally important, they were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard. Almost immediately, the subjects began to take on the pathological characteristics of their respective roles. The guards delighted in devising arbitrary tasks and absurd rules for the inmates, demanding absolute obedience and forcing them to humiliate each other. The prisoners became passive and obedient, taking their frustration out on each other and otherwise assuming the role of victim. As the guards became more abusive, the prisoners became more helpless and dependent. The patterns became so pronounced that Zimbardo grew alarmed and ended what was to have been a two-week experiment after only six days.
    Given the design of this experiment, what happened cannot be explained in terms of the individuals involved. The researchers, like the subjects, had been inclined to “focus on personality traits as internal dispositions for individuals to respond in particular ways,” thus “underestimating] the subtle power of situational forces to control and reshape their behavior.” Most of us make the same error, Zimbardo contends, leading us to try to solve problems by “changing the people, by motivating them, isolating them . . . and so on.” In fact, he concludes, “to change behavior we must discover the institutional supports which maintain the existing undesirable behavior and then design programs to alter these environments.” 4
    This is nowhere more true than in the case of competition. We are constantly reinforced for wanting to be number one because this orientation is appropriate to the win/lose structure in which we keep finding ourselves. It is the fact of having to participate in contests that leads us to try to outdo others. And it is the fact of having to participate in contests that we are going to have to change if we want to move in healthier directions.
    Nearly seventy years ago, John Harvey and his colleagues distinguished between “deliberate” and “involuntary” competition, which are roughly comparable to what I have been calling “intentional” and “structural,” respectively. “In the whole moral environment provided by our civilisation, involuntary competition easily becomes deliberate,” Harvey concluded. Among the personality traits that involuntary competition elicits, he says, is selfishness. “We would not set out to generate [this quality] deliberately, but we cannot escape from doing so incidentally and inadvertently so long as our commercial practice pits one against another, as now it does.” 5
    William Sadler similarly insists that the structure determines how individuals look at the world:
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The value orientation which holds competition high is perpetuated as individuals participate in institutions which help to shape their perception of reality. There is, in other words, a convergence of social forces which fosters a common perception of the world so that it is viewed in competitive terms. Added to this institutional factor is the dissipation of forces that would inhibit competition. 6
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    The evidence offered