Competition when cooperation is the means to success: Understanding context and recognizing mutually beneficial situations

Abstract

Choosing to cooperate or to compete is a regular and important social decision. Certain scenarios call for one over the other, but people do not always behave logically. The present study describes trends to irrationally compete when cooperation is the means to success. A paradigm similar to the Kagan and Madsen (1971) checkers-style game was used in which cooperation resulted in mutual benefit and competition resulted in nothing. The participants in this 25-year observational study were adult university students and coaches, and though they are presumed to be rational thinkers, the large majority of them contradictorily competed. In the rare cases of cooperation during these games, at least one person in the pair tended to come from a rural or community-oriented background; this is a phenomenon worth acknowledging. To be successful, it is essential to understand the full context of a situation in order to recognize mutually beneficial situations. It is necessary to understand cooperative and competitive behaviors to meaningfully advance societal activities as well as maximizing individual benefits.

Keywords

• competition
• cooperation
• collectivism
• individualism