Review of Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition

Kohn's No Contest reviews empirical research on competition. In fact, much work has been done to determine whether competition is better than cooperation and some work has compared competition with doing the best for oneself. The research comes from many fields, but primarily from education, sports, the performing arts,and psychology. The results have been consistent, clear-cut, and surprising: competition typically results in less creativity, poorer performance, and reduced satisfaction.