Competitive Behavior

Abstract

Competitive behavior is a form of social behavior: action in which individuals or groups strive for a goal that cannot be shared, so that one party’s gain is another’s loss. Cognitive psychology asks what the mind is doing when it competes—how it compares itself to others, which goals it adopts, and how rivalry converts into effort or into choking. This article develops the field’s main threads: the first experiment on competition and social facilitation (Triplett); the theory of goal interdependence that defines competition against cooperation (Deutsch); social comparison as the engine of competitive motivation (Festinger and Garcia); the opposing-processes model that explains why competition helps some performances and harms others (Murayama and Elliot); relationship-specific rivalry (Kilduff); and intergroup competition. A worked example and three interactive demonstrations make each mechanism manipulable.

Keywords: competitive behavior, competition, social behavior, social comparison, achievement motivation

Few behaviors are as readily recognised, or as hard to evaluate, as competition. A sprinter runs faster with a rival in the next lane; a student works harder when the class is graded on a curve; two firms drive each other to innovate or to ruin. The same arrangement that sharpens effort in one case produces anxiety, sabotage, or collapse in another. That ambivalence—competition as both a spur and a poison—is the central puzzle the psychology of competitive behavior tries to resolve, and it is why the field has never settled for a simple verdict that competition is good or bad for performance.

What cognitive psychology brings to competition is a shift from asking whether it works to asking how it works: through which mental processes a competitive situation changes what a person attends to, which goals they pursue, how they appraise their standing against others, and what they consequently do. Those processes can be studied experimentally, and the sections below take the major ones in turn—arousal and social facilitation, goal interdependence, social comparison, the opposing goal processes that competition sets in motion, and the relationship-specific and intergroup forms competition takes—after first placing competitive behavior within the broader category of social behavior under which it is classified.

What Competitive Behavior Is

Competitive behavior, in the sense cognitive psychology studies it, is goal-directed action under negative interdependence: a structure in which the goals of the parties are linked so that one can attain its goal only if the others do not. Morton Deutsch made this the defining contrast of his theory of cooperation and competition, arguing that a situation is competitive to the degree that participants perceive their goal attainments to be negatively correlated, and cooperative to the degree they perceive them positively correlated (Deutsch, 1949). On this account competition is not a personality trait or a feeling but a property of the situation—the way the goals are arranged—and the psychological consequences follow from how people perceive and respond to that arrangement.

The purest case is the zero-sum contest, in which one party’s gain exactly equals another’s loss, as in a race for a single prize. But most real competition is only partly zero-sum: a graded class, a sales ranking, or a sports league mixes shared and opposed interests, and the degree of perceived negative interdependence is itself a variable that shapes behavior. Defining competition by goal structure, rather than by hostility or effort, is what lets the field separate the arrangement from its effects—so that the same competitive structure can be shown to raise effort in one person and to provoke anxiety or withdrawal in another.

In the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary, Competitive Behavior is a descriptor defined as “the direct struggle between individuals for environmental necessities or for a common goal,” filed under Social Behavior. The placement is apt: competition is social through and through. Even a solitary athlete chasing a record competes against the remembered performances of others, and the motivation to do so is built out of comparison with other people. The remainder of this article takes the cognitive mechanisms of competitive behavior in turn—facilitation, comparison, the opposing goal processes, and the rivalrous and intergroup forms—and connects each to the cognition it requires.

Perspectives on Competition

The psychology of competition is organised less by one grand theory than by a succession of complementary perspectives, each tied to a distinct mechanism. The earliest asked how the mere presence of a competitor changes performance and found an answer in arousal. A second defined competition structurally, through goal interdependence. A third located the motivational engine in social comparison. A fourth, and the most important modern synthesis, explained competition’s inconsistent effects on performance as the net of opposing goal processes. A fifth distinguished relationship-specific rivalry from ordinary competition, and a sixth examined competition between groups. These perspectives are not rivals so much as layers: a single contest can arouse a performer, structure their goals, invite comparison, and pit one group against another at once. Table 1 summarises them, and the sections that follow develop each in turn.

Figure 1

Mechanisms Linking a Competitive Situation to Behavior

Table 1

Perspectives on Competitive Behavior

Social facilitation: the first experiment

The experimental psychology of competition begins with Norman Triplett. Observing that cyclists rode faster when paced or racing against others than when riding alone against the clock, he set out to test the effect under control, having children wind a fishing reel as fast as they could, sometimes alone and sometimes alongside a co-actor doing the same (Triplett, 1898). Many children wound faster in the paced condition, and Triplett attributed the gain to a dynamogenic factor—the arousing, energising presence of a competitor that releases effort otherwise held in reserve. The study is routinely cited as the first experiment in social psychology, and its core observation—that the presence of others competing at the same task changes performance—seeded the long literature on social facilitation.

The facilitation is not universal. Later work established that the presence of others reliably helps simple, well-learned responses but can impair complex or novel ones, and a meta-analysis of competition and cooperation on motor tasks found that the social arrangement interacts with the task rather than acting uniformly (Stanne et al., 1999). The lesson that competition’s effect depends on what is being performed, rather than being a fixed good, is one the field would return to in a more general form. Demo 1 reconstructs Triplett’s pacing effect as an illustrative facilitation index.

Social comparison: the engine of competitive motivation

Why should the presence of another performer matter at all? Leon Festinger’s theory of social comparison supplies the motive. People have a drive to evaluate their abilities and opinions, Festinger argued, and in the absence of objective standards they do so by comparing themselves with others—preferring others of similar ability, which makes comparison most informative and most competitive precisely when a rival is close in standing (Festinger, 1954). Social comparison turns a neutral co-actor into a yardstick, and the wish to compare favourably is the root of much competitive behavior: to compete is, in large part, to try to win a comparison.

Stephen Garcia and colleagues built this insight into a general model of what makes a situation feel competitive. They distinguish individual factors—such as how close one is to a meaningful standard, how relevant the dimension is to the self, and how similar the rival—from situational factors such as the number of competitors, proximity to a reward or a rank boundary, and the presence of an audience (Garcia et al., 2013). A striking situational case is the N-effect: people compete less hard as the number of competitors grows, because a larger field makes social comparison less diagnostic and a high rank feels less attainable. The model predicts when competitiveness will spike—near the top of a short ranking, with the prize in sight—and when it will fade. Demo 2 lets the reader vary proximity to a standard and the number of rivals and read off an illustrative competitiveness index.

The competition–performance relation: opposing processes

If competition reliably raised effort, it would reliably raise performance; it does not, and explaining that inconsistency is the central achievement of the modern field. Kou Murayama and Andrew Elliot resolved it with a meta-analysis of the competition–performance literature that found the overall direct effect of competition on performance to be essentially null, and then showed why: competition does not act on performance directly but through two opposing pathways (Murayama & Elliot, 2012). Competitive situations tend to raise performance-approach goals—the aim to outperform others—which are generally associated with better performance, and simultaneously raise performance-avoidance goals—the aim to avoid doing worse than others—which are associated with worse performance. Because the two mediators pull in opposite directions, their effects cancel on average, which is why decades of research had produced such a muddled overall picture.

This opposing-processes model reframes the old question. The useful question is not whether competition helps or hurts but which goal pathway a given person or situation activates. Elliot and colleagues extended the account to the dispositional level, distinguishing a person’s trait competitiveness from their perception of the environment as competitive and relating both to the approach and avoidance components of achievement motivation (Elliot et al., 2018). Trait competitiveness is not uniform: a situation-appropriate competitiveness that engages when the contest is relevant and the stakes real is distinct from hypercompetitiveness, an indiscriminate need to compete and win across situations regardless of their relevance, which maps more readily onto the avoidance pathway. The practical upshot is that the same competitive structure can be made productive or destructive depending on whether it is framed around striving to win or around dreading to lose. Demo 3 makes the two pathways manipulable and returns the net effect on performance.

Rivalry and intergroup competition

Not all competition is interchangeable. Gavin Kilduff and colleagues argue that rivalry—a competitive relationship with a specific, salient opponent, built up through a history of close contests and prior interaction—is psychologically distinct from competition against an anonymous field. Rivalry raises motivation and effort beyond what the objective stakes warrant, because the relationship itself carries meaning: past encounters, similarity, and repeated proximity make a particular opponent matter (Converse & Reinhard, 2016). In a study of professional and experimental contests, the presence of a rival was shown to raise performance both in the moment and in subsequent unrelated tasks, so that the motivational charge of rivalry carries forward in time (Pike et al., 2018).

Competition between groups recruits still further processes. Mina Cikara and Jay Van Bavel review the social neuroscience of intergroup relations and show that merely dividing people into groups reshapes perception, emotion, and valuation along us-versus-them lines—extending to schadenfreude, measurable pleasure at the misfortune of a competing group, and a reduced empathic response to its members (Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014). Intergroup competition thus adds to the individual mechanisms a layer of group-based emotion and identity, which is part of why competition between teams, firms, or nations can escalate beyond anything the contestants would pursue alone.

Worked Example

The mechanisms become concrete in three small exercises, each matching one of the demonstrations. The indices below are illustrative—they capture the qualitative shape of published findings rather than reproducing any single reported statistic.

Social facilitation (dynamogenic pacing). Triplett measured how fast children wound a reel alone versus alongside a competitor. Represent performance as a rate and define a facilitation index F = (paced − alone) / alone × 100, the percentage change from the solo baseline:

- Alone, rate 100 vs paced 100: F = (100 − 100) / 100 × 100 = 0.0% — no competitor present, no change. - Weak competitor, paced 112: F = (112 − 100) / 100 × 100 = 12.0% — a modest speed-up. - Matched competitor, paced 125: F = (125 − 100) / 100 × 100 = 25.0% — the fullest pacing effect, a close rival releasing the most effort.

The index captures Triplett’s qualitative result—a competitor’s presence can speed a simple motor task—without implying the gain is universal; on a complex task the same arousal can impair. Demo 1 lets the reader set the paced rate and read off F.

Social comparison (competitiveness index). Garcia’s model says competitiveness rises with proximity to a standard and falls as the number of rivals grows (the N-effect). Let p be a proximity-to-standard weight from 0 to 1 and N the number of competitors, and define an illustrative index C = p × 2 / (1 + N/5), capped at 1:

- Near a rank, few rivals (p = 0.9, N = 2): C = 0.9 × 2 / (1 + 0.4) = 1.29, capped at 1.00 — maximal competitiveness. - Near a rank, many rivals (p = 0.9, N = 20): C = 0.9 × 2 / (1 + 4) = 0.36 — the same closeness, far less drive, because the large field dilutes comparison. - Far from a rank, few rivals (p = 0.3, N = 2): C = 0.3 × 2 / (1 + 0.4) = 0.43 — a small field is not enough when the standard is out of reach.

The index reproduces the model’s key prediction: competitiveness peaks near the top of a short ranking and fades in a crowd. Demo 2 plots C against proximity and rival count.

Opposing processes (net performance effect). The opposing-processes model says competition acts through a helpful approach pathway and a harmful avoidance pathway. Let the approach and avoidance activations each run from 0 to 1, scaled to ±20 performance points, and define the net effect = approach × 20 − avoidance × 20:

- Approach-dominant (approach 0.8, avoidance 0.2): net = 16 − 4 = +12.0 points — competition helps. - Balanced (approach 0.5, avoidance 0.5): net = 10 − 10 = +0.0 points — the null average that the meta-analysis recovered. - Avoidance-dominant (approach 0.2, avoidance 0.8): net = 4 − 16 = −12.0 points — competition hurts.

The balanced case is the crux of Murayama and Elliot’s finding: a near-zero average effect is not the absence of any effect but the cancellation of two strong, opposite ones. Demo 3 lets the reader set both pathways and read off the net.

Discussion

Read across its mechanisms, competitive behavior is not one phenomenon with one effect but a situation—negative goal interdependence—that engages several cognitive systems at once. The social-facilitation tradition established that a competitor’s presence changes performance through arousal, and that the change depends on the task (Triplett, 1898; Stanne et al., 1999). Deutsch’s theory supplied the structural definition that separates the competitive arrangement from its psychological effects (Deutsch, 1949). Social comparison explained where the motive to compete comes from and when it intensifies (Festinger, 1954; Garcia et al., 2013).

The opposing-processes model is the field’s most important integration, because it dissolves the long-standing dispute over whether competition helps or harms performance by showing that the honest average is near zero and that the interesting action is in the two pathways that produce it (Murayama & Elliot, 2012; Elliot et al., 2018). On top of these general mechanisms sit the special forms: rivalry, in which a specific opponent and a shared history add motivational charge beyond the stakes (Converse & Reinhard, 2016; Pike et al., 2018), and intergroup competition, in which group identity adds us-versus-them emotion to the mix (Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014). The honest summary is that these accounts are complementary. Competition is neither tonic nor poison; it is a structure whose effect depends on the goals it activates, the comparisons it invites, and the relationships and groups it engages.

Current Directions

The most active front follows directly from the opposing-processes model: if competition works through goals, the practical question becomes how to structure competition so that it recruits approach rather than avoidance motivation, and recent work on trait versus perceived environmental competitiveness is a step toward predicting which individuals and which settings tip which way (Elliot et al., 2018). A second front is the fine-grained study of rivalry as distinct from generic competition—measuring how competitive history, similarity, and proximity build a rivalrous relationship, and showing that its motivational effects persist across time and spill into unrelated tasks (Pike et al., 2018; Converse & Reinhard, 2016). A third is the social neuroscience of intergroup competition, which is mapping how group membership reshapes valuation and empathy and when competition curdles into pleasure at a rival’s loss (Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014). The common thread is a move away from asking whether competition is good and toward specifying the conditions—goal framing, relationship, group boundary—under which it energises rather than corrodes.

Common Misconceptions

Competition reliably improves performance.

A meta-analysis of the competition–performance relation found the overall direct effect to be essentially null. Competition raises both performance-approach goals, which help, and performance-avoidance goals, which hurt, and on average these cancel. Whether competition improves or impairs a given performance depends on which goal pathway it activates (Murayama & Elliot, 2012).

Competitiveness is simply a personality trait.

Deutsch defined competition as a property of the situation—negative goal interdependence—not of the person, and Garcia’s model shows situational factors such as the number of rivals and proximity to a standard strongly shape how competitive people become. Trait competitiveness exists, but it is only one input alongside the structure of the situation (Deutsch, 1949; Garcia et al., 2013; Elliot et al., 2018).

More competitors make a contest more motivating.

Often the reverse. The N-effect shows that competitive motivation tends to fall as the number of competitors rises, because a larger field makes social comparison less diagnostic and a high rank feel less attainable. Competitiveness is typically highest in a small field near a meaningful standard (Garcia et al., 2013).

A rival is just any competitor.

Rivalry is relationship-specific. A rival is a particular opponent made salient by a history of close contests, similarity, and repeated proximity, and rivalry raises motivation beyond what the objective stakes justify—an effect that generic, anonymous competition does not produce (Converse & Reinhard, 2016; Pike et al., 2018).

Glossary

Choking under pressure.

A drop in skilled performance under the heightened stakes and evaluation that competition brings, often linked to attention shifting to the self and to avoidance-focused goals rather than the task.

Competitive behavior.

Goal-directed action under negative interdependence, in which one party can attain its goal only to the extent that others do not; the subject of this article and a MeSH descriptor filed under social behavior.

Dynamogenic.

Triplett’s term for the energising, arousal-raising effect of a competitor’s presence that he proposed to explain why paced performers worked faster than solitary ones.

Goal interdependence.

The way the goals of different parties are linked. Positive interdependence (goals rise and fall together) defines cooperation; negative interdependence (one’s gain is another’s loss) defines competition, in Deutsch’s theory.

Hypercompetitiveness.

An indiscriminate, trait-like need to compete and win across situations, regardless of whether the contest is relevant or the stakes meaningful; contrasted with situation-appropriate competitiveness.

Intergroup competition.

Competition between groups rather than individuals, which engages group identity and us-versus-them processes, including schadenfreude toward and reduced empathy for a competing group.

N-effect.

The finding that competitive motivation tends to decline as the number of competitors increases, because a larger field makes social comparison less diagnostic and a high rank feel less attainable.

Opposing-processes model.

Murayama and Elliot’s account in which competition affects performance through two opposed mediators—performance-approach goals (helpful) and performance-avoidance goals (harmful)—whose effects largely cancel, yielding a near-null average.

Performance-approach goal.

The aim to demonstrate competence by outperforming others; the pathway through which competition tends to improve performance in the opposing-processes model.

Performance-avoidance goal.

The aim to avoid demonstrating incompetence by not doing worse than others; the pathway through which competition tends to impair performance in the opposing-processes model.

Rivalry.

A relationship-specific form of competition directed at a particular, salient opponent and built from a history of close contests, similarity, and proximity; it heightens motivation beyond the objective stakes.

Social behavior.

Action directed at or shaped by other members of one’s species; the MeSH parent category under which competitive behavior is filed, since competition is always defined relative to others.

Social comparison.

Festinger’s process by which people evaluate their abilities and opinions against those of others, especially similar others; the motivational engine that turns a co-actor into a rival.

Social facilitation.

The change in performance produced by the presence of others doing or watching the same task; facilitating simple, well-learned responses and often impairing complex or novel ones.

Zero-sum.

A contest in which one party’s gain exactly equals another’s loss; the limiting case of negative goal interdependence, approximated but rarely matched by real competition.

Key Researchers

Mina Cikara

(Harvard University). Social psychologist and neuroscientist whose work on intergroup relations documents how group membership reshapes perception, emotion, and valuation, including schadenfreude toward and reduced empathy for competing groups. Google Scholar · Faculty page

Morton Deutsch

(1920–2017) (Columbia University, Teachers College). Founding figure of conflict resolution whose theory of cooperation and competition defined the two through goal interdependence, giving the field its structural definition of competitive situations. Wikipedia

Andrew J. Elliot

(University of Rochester). Motivation scientist whose achievement-goal and approach–avoidance frameworks underlie the modern understanding of competition, and who co-authored the opposing-processes meta-analysis of competition and performance. ORCID · Google Scholar · Faculty page

Leon Festinger

(1919–1989) (Stanford University). Social psychologist whose theory of social comparison identified the drive to evaluate oneself against similar others—the motivational root of much competitive behavior. Wikipedia

Stephen M. Garcia

(University of California, Davis). Social psychologist whose social-comparison model of competition specifies the individual and situational factors—including proximity to a standard and the N-effect—that determine how competitive a situation feels. Google Scholar · Faculty page

Gavin J. Kilduff

(New York University, Stern School of Business). Organisational behavior scholar whose research established rivalry as a distinct, relationship-specific form of competition that intensifies motivation beyond the objective stakes. Faculty page

Kou Murayama

(University of Tübingen). Motivation scientist and lead author of the opposing-processes meta-analysis, which showed that competition’s near-null average effect on performance is the sum of opposed approach and avoidance pathways. ORCID · Google Scholar · Faculty page

Norman Triplett

(1861–1934) (Indiana University). Psychologist who conducted what is widely regarded as the first experiment in social psychology, demonstrating the dynamogenic, performance-speeding effect of a competitor’s presence. Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions

What is competitive behavior in psychology?

Competitive behavior is goal-directed action under negative interdependence—a situation in which one party can reach its goal only to the extent that others do not. Cognitive psychology studies how such situations change what people attend to, which goals they adopt, how they compare themselves with others, and how they consequently perform.

Does competition improve or hurt performance?

Neither reliably. A meta-analysis found competition’s average direct effect on performance to be essentially null, because competition raises both performance-approach goals (which help) and performance-avoidance goals (which hurt), and the two largely cancel. The effect in any given case depends on which goal pathway the situation activates.

How is competition different from cooperation?

Deutsch defined both through goal interdependence. In cooperation, goals are positively interdependent—parties succeed or fail together; in competition, they are negatively interdependent—one party’s gain is another’s loss. Competition is thus the structural mirror of cooperation rather than simply the absence of it.

Why do we compare ourselves with other people?

Festinger’s theory of social comparison holds that people have a drive to evaluate their abilities and opinions, and in the absence of objective standards they do so by comparing with others—preferring similar others, which makes the comparison informative. This drive is the motivational engine of competitive behavior.

What is the N-effect?

The N-effect is the finding that competitive motivation tends to decline as the number of competitors increases. A larger field makes social comparison less diagnostic and a high rank feel less attainable, so people often compete harder in a small field near a meaningful standard than in a crowded one.

How is a rivalry different from ordinary competition?

Rivalry is relationship-specific. It is directed at a particular, salient opponent made meaningful by a history of close contests, similarity, and repeated proximity. Rivalry raises motivation and effort beyond what the objective stakes justify, and its effects can persist across time and spill into unrelated tasks.

What happens cognitively during competition between groups?

Dividing people into groups reshapes perception, emotion, and valuation along us-versus-them lines. Intergroup competition can produce schadenfreude—pleasure at a rival group’s misfortune—and a reduced empathic response to its members, adding group-based emotion to the individual mechanisms of competition.

Is competitiveness a personality trait or a product of the situation?

Both. Deutsch located competition in the structure of the situation, and Garcia’s model shows situational factors strongly shape competitiveness; at the same time, people differ in trait competitiveness. Recent work distinguishes trait competitiveness from the perception of an environment as competitive and relates both to achievement motivation.

References

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Pike, B. E., Kilduff, G. J., & Galinsky, A. D. (2018). The long shadow of rivalry: Rivalry motivates performance today and tomorrow. Psychological Science, 29(5), 804–813. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617744796

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