According to the famous adage from Mark Twain, “It’s not the size of the dog in a fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”@@http://www.johnsonglaw.com/representative_cases_@@
Although this same quote has been reused by athletes and coaches in sports as a source of indefatigable determination, a recent study conducted by University researchers suggests that Twain may have made an accurate point: Age is not a contingent factor in competitions.
Because prior research has found considerable gender differences among young adults — with men being far more competitive than women — University psychology professor and study co-author Ulrich Mayr@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=staff&d=person&b=name&s=Ulrich+Mayr@@ said he and his fellow researchers wanted to find out if such trends persist across the entire life span. Mayr also said the research team was interested finding out if longstanding notions regarding a person’s willingness to compete also corresponds with age.
“With age, a lot things don’t work so well anymore,” Mayr said. “For example, our cognitive abilities gradually decline, so one would expect that as we grow older, our will to enter competitions also declines because we’re just not up to the task anymore.”
As a required educational component of a stimulus grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Aging,@@http://www.nia.nih.gov/@@ Mayr and William Harbaugh,@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=staff&d=person&b=name&s=William+Harbaugh@@ a University economics professor, began the study last summer with a group of Eugene high school students who were participating in a University summer program. After receiving training on conducting research methods, the students then went to the Valley River Center, set up a kiosk and recruited more than 800 adult volunteers. These volunteers were asked to solve some simple arithmetic problems in return for a small cash reward for each correct answer; afterward they had the option to potentially earn a larger payoff if they won against with others in a competition.
According to Mayr, what he and other researcher found was “surprising.” Rather than experiencing a decrease in the willingness to participate in competitions with age, the results of the study seemed to suggest the contrary: A person’s predilection to enter competitions gradually increases up to the age of 50, peaks and only then declines.
“As you grow older, your willingness to compete grows more and more, and that’s true for both men and women,” Mayr said. “That is sort of a fairly new result that I think is relatively unexpected because it goes against this notion that as we grow older, we’re not as capable or competent — so for that reason, it makes us more unwilling to compete. It might suggest that as we grow older, social status and the need to achieve becomes more and more important.”
The study also found that gender differences found by past researchers in young adults do persist across the entire life span in which a female’s unwillingness to compete at various ages from 20, 50 and 70 were almost exactly the same. Although both women and men generated similar responses to questions regarding how well they think they will perform in a task in comparison to other potential competitors, the study found that men generally tend to have more competitive drive than women.
“What is a little curious about that result is that it persists even though women don’t really perform in any different ways,” Mayr said. “It’s not necessarily that men generally perform better than women; so it’s a tendency to enter competitions that doesn’t correspond at all to the experience of how well you are doing a particular task.”
Because societies allocate resources in the form of competitions, Mayr said it is important to analyze the results of the study to reduce the types of biases associated with a person’s competency. Mayr noted that competitions are found throughout society, which isn’t problematic on its own, but is compounded by who is willing to participate in them.
“Let’s say men and women are equally competent, but for whatever reason, women are less willing to enter these competitions,” Mayr said. “They may end up contributing less to society and may end up getting less out of society — not because they are less competent, but because they are unwilling to compete.”
However, Harbaugh said the study itself has limitations because it is being conducted on a cross-sectional basis and may not be applicable in all conditions.
“This experiment shows evidence that college men are motivated by competition than women are, but if you look at who’s at the Clark Honors College, that’s mostly college-aged women, so I’m wondering what’s going on there,” Harbaugh said. “I’m thinking that college-aged women are getting this figured out. They may not be as competitive as men in our experiments, but in real life, they’re doing pretty darn well.”