Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (3 page)

Tom Patterson grew up in Kansas, and was raised by janitors who practiced Christianity. His twin brother, Steve Tazumi, grew up in Philadelphia with a pharmacist father who practiced Buddhism. They were separated soon after their birth, following their mother's passing. The boys knew that each had a twin, but their records had been lost and they had no contact with each other for nearly 40 years.

Yet, as it turns out, Steve and Tom shared the exact same interests and pursued the exact same careers. As Steve explained, “It's phenomenal. He owned a bodybuilding gym and I owned a bodybuilding gym. We're both 100 percent into fitness.” Tom said, “We connected from the first time we met because we're so much alike.”

Genetic factors profoundly shape who we are, but the social comparisons we make as we grow up help to explain this peculiar anomaly: Twins separated at birth and raised in different households are often as similar and sometimes more similar to each other than twins raised together. By all accounts, twins reared together should be more similar than twins raised apart. After all, twins reared together have the same social experiences, are exposed to the same parenting style, and grow up in the same local culture. But here's the catch: Twins reared together have a constant comparison. And when they engage in similar activities, one of them will inevitably come in second. Without a twin nearby to compare him- or herself with, individual twins reared apart are free to pursue their true passions without the vexing experience of having to look up at the superior performance of a twin.

It is this understanding of social comparisons that has even influenced guidelines for adoption agencies. In the world of adoption, the term “artificial twins” refers to adopting a child who would enter a family that already has a child very similar in age. At first glance, artificial twins sounds like a fantastic idea. There is a built-in playmate, and the parents can enjoy economies of scale—one pick-up at school, one drop-off for soccer practice, and so on. As adoption expert Sam Wojnilower explains, however, adoption agencies understand the problem of artificial twins. When an artificial twin is introduced into a family, the social comparison is constant and so corrosive that adoption professionals seek to avoid them altogether.

The power of social comparisons even extends to adult siblings. Consider two sisters. One sister works outside the home and the other does not. What influences their decision whether or not to enter the workforce? Surprisingly, the total amount of household income does not matter much. What really matters is
whether their household income is more or less than their sister's household income.
David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, found that a wife whose husband earned less than her sister's husband is far more likely to feel compelled to work. Why? Because without her participation in the job market, her household income would be less than her sister's household income! We want to keep up with the Joneses, especially when Mrs. Jones is our sister.

Everyone knows that winning a silver medal is better than winning a bronze medal: Second place, of course, is better than third place. And so, second place finishers should be happier than third place finishers, right? Except for the research showing that they aren't. Silver medalists are often miserable.

Just ask Abel Kiviat, who lost the gold by just one-tenth of a second in the 1500-meter race at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. Even at 91 years old, the pain of the silver medal had not receded. As he told his interpreter at the time, “I wake up sometimes and say, ‘What the heck happened to me?' It's like a nightmare.”

Victoria Medvec at Northwestern University studied the facial expressions of medalists at the Olympics. She had raters watch footage of Olympic athletes, both immediately upon completing a competition and on the medal stand. She found that bronze medalists were happier than silver medalists: on the raters' 10-point “happiness” scale, the bronze medalists averaged a 7.1; silver medalists averaged a mere 4.8. Even when the researchers controlled for different types of sports and expectations of athletic performance before the competition, this effect persisted.

In a follow-up study, David Matsumoto and Bob Willingham analyzed the expressions of judo competitors in the 2004 Athens Games. And again, they found the same effect. Not surprisingly, nearly all of the gold medalists smiled (93 percent). Most of the bronze medalists smiled (70 percent). But
none
of the silver medalists they studied had smiled. (These researchers termed their findings the “Silver Medal Face.”)

Why might a bronze medalist be happier than a silver medalist? Like most of us, athletes compare their achievements to those of their nearest neighbors. For silver medalists, the most salient comparison is the gold medal winner. Gold isn't just a little better than silver, it is a lot better. The gold medal is the holy grail. But even though a silver medal is objectively a huge achievement, silver medalists feel vastly inferior to the gold medalists
in comparison
. Their proximity to the gold winner makes it easy for silver medalists to imagine what would have happened had they come in just one place higher.

The story is very different for bronze medalists. A bronze medalist is more likely to be influenced by the downward comparison with the fourth-place finisher. There is no prize for fourth place and no place on the medal stand. Thus, the bronze medalist feels lucky to have narrowly avoided that steep drop from “medalist” to mere “participant.” Sure, second place would have been better, but both second and third are
medalists
.

This effect also explains why people are happier, on average, with the jobs they get right out of college when they graduate during a recession. Objectively, it is terrible to graduate during a recession. Take the recent recession of 2009. If you graduated from college in the spring of 2009, you faced bleak job prospects. In the United States, the probability of finding a job had dropped by almost 40 percent from the year before, and there were six job seekers for every job opening. Because of these competitive pressures, even if you did find a job, it would likely be in a lower-tier industry, and you would probably be paid substantially less than a graduate from the year before. And sadly, these economic effects continue to shadow graduates years later. Studies reveal that graduating in a recession lowers your lifetime earnings. Even 10 years later, graduates from a recession period make as much as 15 percent less than someone who graduated before or after the recession.

Despite this unhopeful picture, Emily Bianchi of Emory University found that people who graduated during a recession were actually
happier
with their jobs than those who entered the workforce during a period of economic expansion. And this effect persisted for years. Long after the recession was over and the economy had improved, people who graduated during a recession remained more satisfied with their jobs. Why?

During a recession, competition for jobs is fierce. When you finally get your first job, you are likely to compare your outcome with the outcomes of many of your peers who did not find a job right away. Thus, you feel grateful and fortunate that you did not suffer a worse fate.

Social comparisons can also help explain the puzzle of what gives rise to revolutions and civil uprisings. Many believe that the trigger is the despondency of the downtrodden as they are carried on a descending escalator to greater poverty. But it turns out that revolutions often occur after prolonged periods of
increasing
prosperity. Imagine that the world has become a better place…until suddenly, there is an abrupt downturn, a swift and unexpected reversal of fortune. Now, we compare our current state of financial struggle and deprivation to the prior years of abundance and plenty. This pattern of improving conditions followed by a sudden and sharp decline has preceded a large number of historical revolutions including the French, Russian, and Egyptian revolutions as well as the American Civil War and the American civil rights movement. In these cases, we can see how the unstable and dynamic nature of scarce resources can cause individuals and groups to pivot from cooperation to competition.

Social comparisons are also at the root of the reverse phenomenon: schadenfreude, taking malicious pleasure in another's misfortune. Schadenfreude is what seizes us when people we envy fall from their high perch. It is why we delight at the mistakes of former rivals, even long after the rivalry has played itself out, and it's why we're fixated on learning the details of the public meltdowns of celebrities like Martha Stewart and Britney Spears.

Neuroscience research led by Hidehiko Takahashi of Japan's National Institute of Radiological Sciences finds evidence that the experience of schadenfreude is more pronounced the more similar the person experiencing the misfortune is to us. His research found that when misfortune befalls others who are similar, but slightly superior to us, one of the major reward parts of the brain (the striatum) lights up.

Sports are a breeding ground for schadenfreude. When Colin Leach of the University of Connecticut studied fans of World Cup soccer, he found that people experience malicious joy when their rivals lose—especially when their own teams are no longer in the tournament. Fans who are no longer able to root for their own national team throw some of their fan energy behind whichever team is playing their rival. As a result, the rival's loss feels almost like a victory. This shows us that there is scientific basis to the phrase that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Social comparisons not only determine whether we smile on a medal stand or harbor feelings of schadenfreude. They can also motivate us to work longer and harder.

In 1992, a lot was at stake for Duke's basketball team. Duke was trying to record back-to-back championships, a feat that had not been accomplished for almost 20 years. But in the NCAA national championship game against Michigan, Duke found itself down by one point at the half. Imagine the coach's speech in that Duke locker room at halftime.

In the second half of the game, a remarkable thing happened. Duke exploded. What had earlier looked like a tight contest became a rout. Duke prevailed over Michigan and won the game by 20 points, 71–51.

It turns out that Duke's performance that night was not an anomaly. Wharton professor Jonah Berger and University of Chicago professor Devin Pope analyzed 18,060 professional basketball games played between 1993 and 2009 to determine the relationship between halftime scores and the final outcomes of games. They found that when a team is trailing by one point at halftime, they are actually
more
likely to win than the team that is ahead. Why?

A halftime score offers an intense social comparison for the trailing team. At halftime, the players stew with frustration at being so close, yet still behind. And so they emerge from the locker room full of motivation. This is likely why Jonah and Devin found that teams down by one point outscore their opponents significantly more in the first four minutes after halftime.

The experience of feeling behind is so unpleasant that most people—not just athletes—will do extraordinary things to regain a lead. Consider the race into space that was fueled by the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the years following World War II. The United States and the Soviets were locked in fierce competition in both military and civilian domains. The race to space, however, was particularly furious. Space exploration represented a new frontier that held both scientific and military importance.

It was with this backdrop that, on July 29, 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower boldly announced that the United States would do something that had never before been done: launch a satellite to orbit Earth. So imagine how he felt when, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union beat him to it and launched the world's first satellite: Sputnik.

But rather than discourage President Eisenhower, the Sputnik launch, or what he termed the “Sputnik Crisis,” lit a fire under the Eisenhower administration. In short order, his administration enacted the National Defense Education Act to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for scholarships, student loans, and equipment; expanded support for the National Science Foundation; and created two new agencies: the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Eisenhower described this new legislation as “an emergency undertaking…to strengthen our American system of education.” But the endgame wasn't simply to invest in education for the sake of education; it was to improve our system of education
in order to beat the Soviets
. In the years that followed, the United States continued to increase the percentage of the federal budget for the space program from 0.1 percent in 1958 to a record 4.41 percent, almost $6 billion, in 1966 (an amount that would equal over $32 billion today).

The experience of falling behind the Russians was so traumatic that its specter even continued to hang over the presidential campaign of 1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy took to the campaign trail vowing that if he was elected, the United States would outperform the Soviets in almost every aspect. And after winning the presidency, Kennedy upped the ante when he famously declared his ambition to put a man on the Moon. In an address at Rice University in Houston in 1962, President Kennedy described the competitive position of the United States in space and the commitment he planned to make to the space program:

To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead…

The feeling of being behind led America to invest a staggering sum of money in its space program. We suspect that this expenditure would have been hotly contested had it not been for the upward social comparison. After all, President Kennedy's vision was not merely to put a man on the Moon, it was to put a man on the Moon
before the Soviets could
.

Social comparisons can motivate teams and countries, but how might it motivate individuals? When Gavin Kilduff of New York University set out to empirically capture the motivational benefits of rivalry, he found that people perform better on effort-based tasks when they compete against their close rivals versus other competitors. And importantly, these effects occur independently of how high the stakes are in the competition. In one study, Gavin analyzed data from a running club and found that the mere presence of a rival in a race—someone who was demographically similar, whom the runner had repeatedly raced against, and was relatively evenly matched with—caused people to run faster. And the more rivals present in a race? The faster the runner ran.

So, in many cases, comparisons can motivate us to run faster, play harder, or rocket to the Moon. But can they become
too
motivating? Could a fear of falling behind push us to engage in very risky actions or even unethical behavior?