Competition: a guest post by Tina

Hi, I'm Tina, author of a blog about faith (The Faith Question), and today I'll be contributing a guest post to Cordelia's blog about cooperation. In this post I'll share my perspective about how cooperation has been more central to human evolution and success than competition.

I'll start with this word: competition. Too often, we attribute concepts like the propagation of our species, our success at school or at work, and our athletic performance to this word. But is competition the core of human survival and success?

Certainly not.

Another "c" word, cooperation, has influenced our development as a human species in coordination more fundamentally than competition. There's evidence that cooperation's been a trait that evolution has selected for in the way people conduct affairs in most places and cultures--they expect reciprocity. How is reciprocity a cooperative behavior? In a reciprocal relationship, two parties benefit. Competition, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game: one party benefits while the other suffers. 

What evidence is there, then, that cooperation's been selected for throughout evolution? Robert L. Trivers, American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, found early hunter gatherer populations to have characteristics favorable to the development of cooperation. This Psychology Today article brushes over some of those characteristics, including longer lifespans of members of society, a small percentage of people that leave the society, individuals needing the help of others, and a lot of parental care for young. In early hunter and gatherer populations, as Trivers also found, individuals who refused to "reciprocate"--in other words, cooperate--were left out of the affairs of the society. Through weeding out those individuals unable or unwilling to cooperate from society, cooperation became a more common trait in members of human society.

Where, then, does competition fit into the story of human evolution? Interestingly enough, competition is a form of cooperation. What is at the heart of cooperation but working to advance the goals of other individuals or a group as a whole? When our more primitive predecessors fought over resources or territory, they pushed each other to fight more viciously. In this way, they competed, but cooperated. Also, after competing, only the stronger of our predecessors survived, which cooperatively benefited the evolution of humans.

There is also evidence that competition in itself is not a universal trait, thus strengthening the claim that it is a sole form of cooperation. As is noted in this article, the Zuni and Iroquois Indian tribes were found in a study conducted by American anthropologist Margaret Mead to be unfamiliar with competition. If competition were in fact universal or a fundamental human instinct, would they not have experienced it already?

As Americans, some may criticize how much our capitalistic society often emphasizes and encourages competition. For those that think that way, I would suggest that they recognize that competition is grounded in cooperation. Let's say you apply for job position knowing that the only candidates for the position are yourself and another individual with similar credentials. You may push yourself out of your comfort zone to make your application or interview exceptional, and your counterpart does the same. The competition between you, then, is also cooperation, because you're bringing out the best in each other.

Now let's suppose the same scenario, except with a slight difference: the other candidate for the job position was destined to lose because you've got a connection in the company and knew from the start you'd be hired over anybody. And because you are guaranteed a position, you never strive to improve your resume, application, or interview. Your counterpart, however, does. In that case, the lack of competition between you and your counterpart fails to bring out the best in both of you, and thus there is no cooperation between you.

I'd like to pose a final question to readers of this blog post: do you agree with my assessment of cooperation and competition? Having experienced both behaviors, do you believe they are more intertwined or less related than I've described here?