Top Dog, a new book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman about “the science of winning and losing” is in large part a celebration of competition. The authors of the bestselling NurtureShock explore the benefits of what they call “competitive fire” — stories of Olympic swimmers, champion chess players, and upstart political candidates who reached the top by racing someone else. But just as interesting are the cases in which we do better without the element of competition. Sometimes, it turns out, competing against others can actually make our performance worse. Bronson and Merryman describe an experiment in which researchers gave 124 Princeton University underclassmen a test that drew its questions from the GRE, the graduate school admissions test. For some of the students, the investigators added to the stress of this difficult exam in two ways. First, the students were asked to report which high school they’d attended and how many of their high school classmates were also at Princeton. “This was intended to make most test-takers feel as if they were alone at Princeton, that they were lucky to be at Princeton, and that they had barely made the bar for admittance,” Bronson and Merryman explain. (MORE: Relax, It’s Only a Test) Second, researchers further added to students’ stress by labeling the test as an “Intellectual Ability Questionnaire.” Bronson and Merryman again: “They wanted the test’s title to be threatening to the students, to make the students fear that, if they did poorly, the test would reveal they lacked the true ability to be at Princeton.” The other group of students answered the questions about high school only after taking the test, when it could no longer affect their performance, and their exam went by the less-threatening name “Intellectual Challenge Questionnaire.” The results? Students in the first group answered 72% of the questions correctly; those in the second group got 90% of their answers right. By subtly manipulating the competitive stress felt by the participants, Bronson and Merryman note, the researchers “were able to engineer an 18% difference in their test scores.” (MORE: Highlighting Is … Continue reading Can Tough Competition Hinder Academic Performance?