Psychology Of Cooperation And Competition Research Paper

2. Cognitive-Developmental Theory

The ‘cognitive developmental perspective’ is largely based on the theories of Piaget (1950), Vygotsky (1978), cognitive science, and academic controversy (Johnson and Johnson 1995). To Jean Piaget (1950), cooperation is the striving to attain common goals while coordinating one’s own feelings and perspective with a consciousness of others’ feelings and perspective. From Piaget and related theories comes the premise that when individuals co-operate on the environment, socio-cognitive conflict occurs that creates cognitive disequilibrium, which in turn stimulates perspective-taking ability and cognitive development. Cooperative learning in the Piagetian tradition is aimed at accelerating a student’s intellectual development by forcing him or her to reach consensus with other students who hold opposing points of view about the answer to the school task.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1978) and related social constructionist theorists claim that our distinctively human mental functions and accomplishments have their origins in our social relationships. Mental functioning is the internalized and transformed version of the accomplishments of a group. Knowledge is social, constructed from cooperative efforts to learn, understand, and solve problems. A central concept is the ‘zone of proximal development,’ which is the zone between what a student can do on his or her own and what the student can achieve while working under the guidance of instructors or in collaboration with more capable peers. Unless students work cooperatively, they will not grow intellectually and the time students work alone on school tasks should therefore be minimized.

From the cognitive science viewpoint, cooperative learning involves modeling, coaching, and scaffolding (conceptual frameworks provided for understanding what is being learned). The learner must cognitively rehearse and restructure information for it to be retained in memory and incorporated into existing cognitive structures (Wittrock 1990). An effective way of doing so is explaining the material being learned to a collaborator. Tutoring, when it is viewed from the perspective of the benefits that accrue to the tutor, is also a form of cooperative learning.

‘Controversy theory’ (Johnson and Johnson 1995) posits that being confronted with opposing points of view creates uncertainty or conceptual conflict, which creates a reconceptualization and an information search, which results in a more refined and thoughtful conclusion. The key steps are organizing what is known into a position, advocating that position to someone who is advocating the opposing position, attempting to refute the opposing position while rebutting the attacks on one’s own position, reversing perspectives so that the issue may be seen from both points of view simultaneously, and creating a synthesis to which all sides can agree.

3. Behavioral-Learning Theory

The ‘behavioral learning perspective’ assumes that individuals will work hard on those tasks for which they secure a reward of some sort and will fail to work on tasks that yield no reward or yield punishment (Bandura 1977, Skinner 1968). Cooperative efforts are designed to provide incentives for the members of the group to participate in a group effort since it is assumed that individuals will not intrinsically help their classmates or work toward a common goal. Skinner focused on group contingencies, Bandura focused on imitation, and Homans as well as Thibaut and Kelley focused on the balance of rewards and costs in social exchange among interdependent individuals. Recently, Bandura (2000) has conceptualized cooperation as collective agency. In ‘collective agency’ individuals have to work together to secure what they cannot accomplish on their own.

The most developed behavioral theory of cooperation and competition was developed by Kelley and Thibaut (1978). They assumed that individuals act to maximize their self-interests by behaving in ways to maximize their rewards and minimize their punishments or costs. ‘Rewards’ are defined as positive interaction experiences that yield outcomes that pro-mote physical or emotional well-being, self-esteem, or personal growth such as enjoyment, fulfillment, or contentment. ‘Costs’ are defined as negative inter-action experiences that yield physical or emotional pain or failure. People attempt to recreate experienced interactions that yield pleasure and avoid interactions that yield pain. ‘Cooperation’ is thus defined as acting in ways perceived to maximize joint rewards and minimize joint costs, ‘competition’ as acting in ways to maximize ones own rewards and minimize ones own costs relative to others, and ‘individualistic efforts’ as acting in ways to maximize ones own rewards and minimize ones own costs with little or no regard of the outcome for others. In evaluating outcomes, individuals have a ‘comparison level’ about what constitutes an acceptable outcome and a ‘comparison level for alternatives’ about how those outcomes compare to other possible outcomes. Cooperation tends to occur when outcomes are correspondent and com-petition tends to occur when outcomes are non-correspondent.

4. Social Interdependence Theory

The roots of social interdependence theory lie in the early 1900s when Kurt Koffka (one of the founders of the Gestalt School of Psychology) proposed that groups were dynamic wholes in which the interdependence among members could vary. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kurt Lewin refined Koffka’s notion, proposing that the essence of a group is the interdependence among members (created by common goals), and that interdependence results in the group being a ‘dynamic whole’ so that a change in the state of any member or subgroup changes the state of any other member or subgroup. Continuing Lewin’s work, in 1949 Morton Deutsch (1949, 1962) formulated social interdependence theory.

‘Social interdependence’ exists when individuals share common goals and each individual’s outcomes are affected by the actions of the others (Deutsch 1962, Johnson and Johnson 1989). It may be differentiated from social dependence (i.e., the outcomes of one person are affected by the actions of a second person but not vice versa) and ‘social independence’ (i.e., individuals’ outcomes are unaffected by each other’s actions). There are two types of social interdependence: cooperative and competitive. The absence of social interdependence and dependence results in individualistic efforts.

‘Cooperation’ exists when individuals work together to accomplish shared goals. When a situation is cooperatively structured, individuals’ goal achievements are positively correlated; individuals perceive that they can reach their goals if, and only if, the others in the group also reach their goals. Thus, individuals seek outcomes that are beneficial to all those with whom they are cooperatively linked. ‘Competition’ exists when individuals work against each other to achieve a goal that only one or a few can attain. When a situation is structured competitively, individuals’ goal achievements are negatively correlated; each individual perceives that when one person achieves his or her goal, all others with whom he or she is competitively linked fail to achieve their goals. Thus, individuals seek an outcome that is personally beneficial but detrimental to all others in the situation. ‘Individualistic efforts’ exist when individuals work by themselves to accomplish goals unrelated to the goals of others. When a situation is structured individualistically, there is no correlation among participants’ goal attainments. Each individual perceives that he or she can reach his or her goal regardless of whether other individuals attain or do not attain their goals. Thus, individuals seek an outcome that is personally beneficial without concern for the outcomes of others.

5. Interaction Patterns

The basic premise of social interdependence theory is that the type of interdependence structured in a situation determines how individuals interact with each other which, in turn, determines outcomes (Deutsch 1949 1962, Johnson and Johnson 1989). Positive interdependence tends to result in promotive interaction; negative interdependence tends to result in opposition or contrient interaction, and no interdependence results in an absence of interaction. ‘Promotive interaction’ occurs when members help and assist each other, exchange resources, give and receive feedback, challenge each other’s reasoning, and encourage increased effort. Group members focus on maximizing the success of their groupmates as well as their own. ‘Oppositional interaction’ occurs as individuals discourage and obstruct each other’s efforts to achieve. Individuals focus both on increasing their own success and on preventing anyone else from being more successful than they are. ‘No interaction’ exists when individuals work independently without any interaction or interchange with each other. Individuals only focus on increasing their own success and ignore as irrelevant the efforts of others. Each of these interaction patterns creates different outcomes.

Deutsch (1949, 1962) noted that depending on whether individuals promote or obstruct each other’s goal accomplishments, there is ‘substitutability’ (i.e., the actions of one person substitute for the actions of another), ‘cathexis’ (i.e., the investment of psycho-logical energy in objects and events outside of oneself ), and ‘inducibility’ (i.e., openness to influence). Essentially, in cooperative situations the actions of participants substitute for each other, participants positively cathect to each other’s effective actions, and there is high inducibility among participants. In competitive situations the actions of participants do not substitute for each other, participants negatively cathect to each other’s effective actions, and inducibility is low. When there is no interaction, there is no substitutability, cathexis, or inducibility. The relation-ship between the type of social interdependence and the interaction pattern it elicits is assumed to be bi-directional. Each may cause the other.

6. Outcomes

The investigation of cooperation and competition is the longest standing research tradition within American social psychology. Between 1898 and 1989, re-searchers conducted over 520 experimental studies on social interdependence and over 100 correlational studies (Johnson and Johnson 1989). Since research participants have varied widely as to sex, economic class, age, and cultural background, since a wide variety of research tasks and measures of the de-pendent variables have been used, and since the research has been conducted by many different re-searchers with markedly different orientations working in different settings and in different decades, the overall body of research on social interdependence has considerable generalizability.

The numerous outcomes studied may be subsumed within three broad categories (Johnson and Johnson 1989): (a) effort to achieve; (b) positive relationships; and (c) psychological health. In terms of productivity and achievement, a meta-analysis of all available studies (Johnson and Johnson 1989) found that the average person in a cooperative situation performed at about 2/3 a standard deviation above the average person learning within a competitive (effect size = 0.67) or individualistic situation (effect size = 0.64). These results held constant when group measures of productivity were included as well as individual measures, for short-term as well as long-term studies, and when symbolic as well as tangible rewards were used. In terms of relationships, over 180 studies indicate that cooperative efforts, compared with competitive and individualistic experiences, promoted considerable more liking among individuals (effect sizes = 0.66 and 0.62, respectively) even when individuals were from different ethnic and historical backgrounds, or were handicapped. In addition, over 106 studies indicate that cooperative experience promoted greater task-oriented and personal social support than did competitive (effect size = 0.62) or individualistic (effect size = 0.70) efforts. Finally, the research indicates that (a) working cooperatively with peers and valuing cooperation result in greater psychological health than does competing with peers or working independently and (b) cooperative attitudes are highly correlated with a wide variety of indices of psychological health. Competitiveness was in some cases positively and in some cases negatively related to psychological health, and individualistic attitudes were negatively related to a wide variety of indices of psychological health. In addition, over 80 studies indicated that cooperative experiences promoted higher self-esteem than do competitive (effect size = 0.58) or individualistic (effect-size= 0.44) experiences. Cooperative experiences also tended to increase perspective-taking ability while competitive and individualistic experiences tended to promote egocentrism (being unaware of other perspectives other than your own) (effect sizes of 0.61 and 0.44, respectively). It is through cooperative efforts that many of the attitudes and values essential to psychological health (such as self-efficacy) are learned and adopted. Social skills and competencies tend to increase more within cooperative than in competitive or individualistic situations (Johnson and Johnson 1989). These outcomes of cooperative efforts (effort to achieve, quality of relationships, and psychological health) form a gestalt where each influences the others and they are therefore likely to be found together.

7. Basic Elements

In order for cooperative efforts to be effective, five elements must be structured in the situation: positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, social skills, and group processing. ‘Positive interdependence’ exists when one perceives that one is linked with others in a way so that one can-not succeed unless they do (and vice versa) and that one must coordinate one’s efforts with the efforts of others to complete a task (Johnson and Johnson 1989). Cooperative efforts may be built on outcome interdependence (i.e., goals and/or reward interdependence or each group member’s success in achieving a goal or receiving a reward depends on the joint efforts of all group members) and means interdependence (i.e., resource, role, and task interdependence or group members being tied together by complementary re-sources, interlocking roles, or a division of labor).

‘Individual accountability’ exists when the performance of each individual student is assessed and the results given back to the group and the individual. It is important that the group knows who needs more assistance, support, and encouragement in completing the task and group members know that they are responsible for doing their share of the work. ‘Pro-motive interaction’ may be defined as individuals encouraging and facilitating each other’s efforts to complete tasks and achieve in order to reach the group’s goals. Promotive interaction is characterized by group members helping and assisting each other, exchanging information and resources, and encouraging each other to learn.

‘Social skills’ are the actions needed to effectively interact with other people. Leadership, decision-making, trust building, communication, and conflict-management skills are examples. Social skills form the basic nexus among individuals, and if individuals are to work together productively, they must have a modicum of these skills. ‘Group processing’ may be defined as reflecting on group efforts to (a) describe what member actions were helpful and unhelpful in achieving the group’s goals and maintaining effective working relationships among members, and (b) make decisions about what actions to continue or change. The purpose of group processing is to clarify and improve the effectiveness of the members in contributing to the joint efforts to achieve the group’s goals.

8. Enhancing Factors

Deutsch (1962, 1973, 1985) has posited that trust, conflict, and distributive justice are mediators of the effectiveness of cooperation. The greater the trust, the more effective cooperative efforts tend to be, the more constructive conflicts tend to be, and the more positive relationships tend to be. Effective cooperative requires that conflicts of interest are resolved constructively and when decisions involve diverse points of view individuals strive to reach agreement through a process of argument and synthesis. In cooperative efforts the distribution of benefits is based on equality and need while in competitive situations benefits are distributed according to equity (high performers receive more than low performers).

9. Competitive And Individualistic Efforts

Competition tends to result in constructive consequences when it occurs within a broader cooperative context, clear and fair rules, and criteria for winning are present, the task is appropriate, the task may be completed individually, competitors have an equal chance of winning, and winning is of low importance (Johnson and Johnson 1975 1999; Stanne et al. 1999). The conditions under which individualistic efforts have an advantage over cooperative efforts are un-clear.

10. Future Directions

The tension between cooperation and competition has not ended. Considerably more research is needed on the nature of cooperation and the variables that mediate its effectiveness. There is new interest in collective agency (Bandura 2000). The nature of competitive and individualistic efforts the conditions under which they are effective need to be further investigated. There is a current interest in the values inherently taught by participating in cooperative and competitive situations (Johnson and Johnson 1999). Cooperation, for example, may promote a concern for the well-being of others and a desire to contribute to the common good, while competition may promote a desire to be better than others and a concern for self-gain at the expense of others. Finally, one of the least understanding aspects of cooperation and competition is inducibility, the willingness to be influenced by others. Inducibility is the center of constructive power, which occurs, in cooperative but not competitive situations. World events, furthermore, such as in-creasing economic interdependence among countries but fractionalization within countries, will keep interest in the study of cooperation and competition high in the future.

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