Obsessed with Winning

The 2011 Super Bowl between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers was a game between two relatively small market teams. You would think that interest would be stifled for a game like this. But the game has eclipsed last year’s Super Bowl as the most watched television program in history. Everyone loves for their team to win; but in this case, most people watching don’t have their team in the game. Why are they watching? Why do they gamble on a game so distant?

Americans are consumed by competition and this results in negative consequences for us. But, we are not aware of the consequences. Even worse, we are not aware of why we need competition so essentially. The impact of wining and losing is not only destructive but also invisible.

America is an intensely driven, dynamic culture that is hollow at its core. Our relentless pursuit on winning comes from a preoccupation to find meaning. Competition is the means that we have devised to help us find our purpose and predictability. The lure of competition is quite great, but we have remarkably little understanding about what it means. This creates an inherent problem with Americans obsession on winning.

Victory has rewards. But the nature of competition goes beyond the titles and trophies that we win. It opens the gateway to more socially substantial rewards. It is the risk of loss that we are drawn to, the more uncertainty of risk, the larger the thrill. The inherent pleasure of winning does not come from the absence of doubt, but its presence.

Americans enjoy winning because it allows them to differentiate themselves from their peers. This fits our implicit belief that differences are natural and status is justified. Winning allows us to ultimately discover if our competitor is superior. There is tension then relief. The possibility of failure captures our attention.

For spectators, a close competitive event provides the chance to experience the sense of freedom possibility that is missing from much of our lives. The experience is uplifting as we get energized by the competitor’s action and throw off our normal passivity. But there is also a sadistic side; competition allows us to watch the pain, joy, and ultimate disappointment of others. We identify with the winners and use their superior performance as a signal of our own superior abilities. We derive a sense of vicarious differentiation.

Winners also can assert the power of worldview; “I win therefore I am right.” Winning gives an affirmation of truth of one’s worldview from winning. We can also over-generalize from the losing position. Defeat informs losers that they are wrong; therefore, they must engage in some type of soul searching because they have weaknesses and limitations that require improvement. Loss leads to simplistic explanations and attributions.

When our society evaluates losers, it considers more than just the outcome; the competitor’s attitude is also weighted because there are different levels of losers. We evaluate competitors partly on how they pursued their objectives and on their mental approach to the competition. If they had goal clarity, uncompromising effort, relentless optimism, or a willingness to learn we tend to improve our evaluation of them. All these affect how a competitor is evaluated upon losing because society believes that mental attitudes impact victory, and victory is not enough to declare one a “winner”.

But the victory is more than the final score. We inject additional value into the competitive outcome. Americans can take a simple competitive event like winning an election and detrimentally turn it into an indicator of prestige, honor, and power. Victory is not an endpoint; it is a gateway to higher values we want. The author illustrates this with a “prize ladder” that shows how prizes are abstracted from the competitive event as one moves up the ladder. The prizes become more nebulous notions; they tell us about our worthiness, not only when it comes to the competitive realm but also generally about us as persons in general.
As Americans, we live in competitions web, snared in its silk, striving to escape but doomed in our efforts. We do not live through experiences. Instead, we interpret and attach meaning to make sense of events. Competition and its consequences stem from our mind-set.