Two studies show that exposure to exemplary peer performances can undermine motivation and success by causing people to perceive that they cannot attain their peers’ high levels of performance. It also causes de-identification with the relevant domain. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160202143624.htm Link to paper (free but require sign-in): http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/28/0956797615623770
I think it likely depends on whether you view the exemplary performance as a realisticly attainable goal that you might achieve yourself. For example, suppose you see Barry win Employee of the Month for the third time - an award you've never received. If you believe that you likely possess all of Barry's skills or might soon reach his level, or perhaps that there are factors other than your comparative method that might account for Barry's wins, then you might work harder to try to win Employee of the Month yourself. On the other hand, you might throw up your hands and say "I'll never be able to compete with Barry" for whatever reason. Barry just has better employee skills, or he is a favorite with management, or whatever. So you might say "Since I'll never get Employee of the Month while Barry is here, I might as well stop trying for it. And hey, all things considered, maybe I'm just not cut out for this job anyway. And you know what? I'm not sure I even like doing this that much."
This is entirely cultural: a product of highly competitive capitalism. The whole organization - every organization, but especially business - is structured so that there can only ever be a few very successful individuals, while everyone else is anonymous drones. And, of course, there is a huge and growing stigma on 'losers.' So, if one stands out as a 'natural' star, anyone who competes with that one is likely to lose and suffer the humiliation of losing. If you don't compete, you're just another drone, which is okay.
This has been noticed in larger environments, not only specific competitions, by people (such as Daniel Kahneman) looking at things like college choice vs career success, including in the sciences and other high end academic pursuits: barring the minority of the very best who are top dogs wherever they go, high ability students who go to really good schools don't do as well as equivalently high ability students who go to second rate schools. The reason seems to be the discouragement of having been surrounded by people of higher capabilities than oneself while in college. This happens even though the pool with which one is competing, in one's career, is the same for all - and the good school grad has a leg up, even, by reputation. As some literary figure I can't recall put it, if you aren't a damn genius a Harvard education is a permanent handicap in life. So prudence suggests that you don't go to the best school you can get into, unless you are overqualified for it. And two other things happen: One is that the chip on the shoulder we see in smart people forced by economics to attend cheap schools but learning about "life" thereby, the blue collar illusion that the privileged are lazier and less virtuous, is reinforced by experience; another is that artificial appearances of superior ability created by privilege work as lasting and pervasive discouragements to most of the rest (racial disparities in education come into view). Related note: In the US you can boost the test measured IQ of a black man 10 points or more by somehow deceiving him about the nature of the test, concealing from him the fact that he is taking an IQ test. This does not work for white men.
There are several psychological and social factors involved in those results. Let's face it: our minds are complex and nimble machines: we adapt our perfor4mance in all kinds of ways that seem to provide better chances of survival. Girls test higher in all-girl schools - not because the smart ones go there, but because girls know better than to compete intellectually with their male peers. The same may be a factor in black vs white man competitions. A society that punishes losers (and penalizes even second- and third- place finishers) loses a huge amount in productivity, in cohesion and in public health. If we wanted the most productive, most efficient performance, the best result with a minimum of waste and duplication of effort, we would organize production on a co-operative, rather than a competitive basis. Education would benefit from this model, as well. As a bonus, we'd halve or maybe even decimate depressive illness.
I really want this to come true. I think, that nature has not made us to be competitors for all our live and in all our activities. Our ancestors lived in small groups which could only thrive if they worked together, and if people who did the "lower jobs" were valued as much as "top performers" - because the group needed all of them. I'm quite sure that this long time of our species living and evolving in such groups shaped us to do best in this organization, and I see the mentioned raise of mental problems in highly comptetitive environments as a sign, that we currently and working againts our nature, to the point where many become ill due the conflict of the way they are made, and the way they are expected to act.
Have you ever seen a documentary titled Happy ? More psychologists are dealing with this subject matter as more people spiral out and shoot their school- and work-mates. There is nothing wrong with competition in sport and games: it helps sort out who is good at what. But you're supposed to be competing against the other team, not members of your own. Americans, of course, make a contest out of everything! Singing, dancing, modeling clothes, cooking... Start early enough with baby beauty contests, and the children are guaranteed to grow up warped. What kind of sense does that make? Well, it trains a work-force and administration that accept disparity without question.
It isn't just beauty pageants and sports, etc. Competition also exists in the education system, where there is intense pressure on students to keep doing more and more to obtain better results. South Korea, for example, has an insanely high rate of suicide among children, because of academic pressure. It's just one tragedy in a country where suicide is the leading cause of death among teens, and 11- to 15-year-olds report the highest amount of stress out of 30 developed nations. A relentless focus on education and exams is often to blame. For a typical high school student, the official school day may end at 4 p.m., but can drag on for grueling hours at private cram institutes or in-school study hall, often not wrapping up until 11 p.m. "Every high school, they do this," high school juniors Han Jae Kyung and Yoon Seoyoon tell NPR. The 14-hour days in classrooms reflects South Korean society's powerful focus on educational achievement. "The overriding impression was just a level of intensity I had never experienced at all," say Tom Owenby. He spent five years in Seoul, teaching English and AP history classes. He's now a professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, but his Korean experience is hard to forget. "It's not about finding your own path or your own self as it is about doing better than those around you. It's in many ways a zero sum game for South Korean students," says Owenby. Everything here seems to ride on a single college entrance exam — the suneung — taken in November. It's so critical that planes are grounded on test day for fear of disturbing the kids. Results determine which universities students can get into, and since there are as few as three colleges considered top tier by future employers, the competition is fierce and the stakes are sky high. "The chances of getting into a really top school are the chances of you getting hit by lightning," student Han Jae Kyung says. It's no surprise, then, that researchers found more than half the Koreans age 11 to 15 reported high levels of stress in their daily lives. That's a higher percentage of stressed out kids than in any of the 30 other developed nations that are part of the OECD, or Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. By any measure, this is exceptionally alarming. Students are compared to each other and they are expected to do better than their classmates. Failure is not an option. The result is a stupidly high suicide rate among teenagers. In this case, it isn't just a case of being discouraged by seeing others do well as one would expect with something like jealousy, for example. It is also a case of being discouraged because one cannot keep up or do better. With alarming results.
There are things that humans do that others cannot do as well at. Taking a test to see how good your memory is can't be held as the only thing that makes someone "smarter" than others but only that they have better memories. I wasn't very good at test taking but excelled in my metal shop classes, band, wood shop, and agriculture classes. Nothing on tests ever ask about those things in which I did great in but it didn't bother me for I knew that tests can't tell how smart or dumb a person is. Tests are a great thing to see how people are doing in certain areas of school but they don't give the true evaluation and that's why tests, to me, aren't very good to learn ALL about someone's abilities.
It is, as others have already noted, entirely a product of societies which reward individual effort and promote individualism. Having recently been enrolled at a university for reasons which I viewed as not being about improving my employment chances, but rather about improving my personal knowledge, I can attest to the sense of disappointment I felt when marked assignments were handed out in class and I hadn't done as well as others, some of whom consistently got high marks. My marks were all over the place, but I squeaked through in the end. I was also older than all my fellow students, and all the lecturers. I did it for selfish reasons, more to see if I could still do it at my age, so, given the age handicap I probably did pretty well. It probably has improved my employment chances, except I can really only work part time now, and there aren't many jobs like that in my usual line of work, which is systems engineer/network engineer. I can also attest to the fact that most other people I have met in my line of work, prefer to work by themselves, with interaction with others kept to a minimum.
That "alarming" is one POV. Another is that Darwinian selection is rapidly making Koreans smarter, more intelligent, more adaptive, each generation. S. Korea is already one of the most economically competive exporting nations per capita.* Perhaps this is why? * Many smaller population nations, like: Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, etc. do better. Very good education is the key to success with this measure. S. Korea is big enough to design and export cars, and high tech items.
Compared to the young who killed themselves as academically doing poorly, yes. Article states that in the 11 to 15 year old group, suicide is the leading cause of death, and implies it is often due to lack of academic success.
But are those actually the least intelligent, etc? In the US, the depressed and suicidal tend to be those with higher expectations placed on them than they think they can meet. I'm thinking children of the above average - and consequently ambitious - parents might be under the most pressure, given the norm of regression to the mean. Confidence correlates as poorly with capability in South Korea as anywhere else, I'm thinking. That would screw up the Darwinian cull, in a sociological competition like that. Another factor: time of birth. These exams are being given yearly, to people young enough that several extra months of development would make a significant difference not necessarily registered in the exam scoring as a measure of intrinsic capability. In the US and Canada I know this factor makes an overwhelmingly significant difference in such similar competitions as - say - the culling of ability that produces professional grade hockey players. Those born late in the year class have essentially no chance - constantly being graded in competition with significantly older kids.
Exam-taking and work-exhaustion do nothing for the human genome. The highest-achievers not only have fewer offspring, but also have no time to socialize their offspring, who will then also grow up competitive, unhappy and maladjusted. But that's okay, since all this strife and craziness is tearing societies down. When the food-crunch comes, it'll be the least academically gifted who eat the rich.
