I threw a buzzer at my roommate’s head. He was beating me at what was supposed to be a “friendly” game of Taboo. My old lacrosse coach would have been mortified at my bad sportsmanship. The odd thing is, I don’t consider myself a competitive person. I played team sports growing up, but always chose defensive positions because they felt less aggressive. I ran track one year to get out of gym, but faked sick before every meet. Competition in the workplace makes me uneasy, which is partially why I enjoy working for myself. I would never fight over a guy. But when it comes to board games, it’s a cage match to the death.
Competition Is in Our Blood
We’re all hardwired to compete. Evolutionarily speaking, that’s why we’re here—because we’ve competed over resources and mates, and we’ve won. At least our genes have. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, the fight in “fight or flight.”
But the fact that you have to run faster than the person on the treadmill next to you is not all inborn. As is becoming increasingly clear in the nature-nurture debate, most personality traits are an organic product of both genetic inheritance and learned behavior. Perhaps our genes are telling us to earn more and produce faster, but competitiveness is also instilled by our individual upbringings and society as a whole.
In Western cultures, it’s widely accepted that men are more competitive than women—not that men are better competitors, but that they’ll choose to compete more readily than women. The theory has even been used as an argument for the wage gap between the sexes. Walk into a sports bar on any Monday night during football season, and it’s easy to see why this belief persists.
However, a recent study of competitiveness in patriarchal and matrilineal societies suggests the trait might not be as connected to gender as once believed. In their experiment, scientists found that men from the patriarchal Maasai tribe of Tanzania did indeed opt to compete more often than women. But the opposite was true in the female-dominated matrilineal Khasi society. The Khasi women were even slightly more competitive than the Maasai men. Other than offering a reason for women to shout “Booya!” in men’s faces, the study is significant in that it strongly suggests competitiveness is learned. Women compete less in Western society because that’s what we’re taught to do.
