How To Deal With Toxic Competition
So even when besting someone else has no real-life consequences, it seems, we just can’t help competing. In the Stanford study, the fictional partner wasn’t even an actual competitor. The participants didn’t even know who their partner was, and couldn’t see them, but they did all they could to thwart them anyway. They even eased up on their own → efforts: Participants who gave more difficult letters to the other student worked less hard on their own word task, apparently feeling that if their partner did poorly, they needn’t aim as high as they otherwise might....