Can Tough Competition Hinder Academic Performance?
http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/22/can-tough-competition-hinder-academic-performance/?hpt=hp_bn18
This is a really interesting idea to me. I have noted myself that the company you keep has a huge influence on the path you take (from as simple as which line you are standing in to check out, what cars surround you at a stoplight or going down the highway to who your relatives and friends are) and I have noted many times in the past that certain intellectual exercises become easier when hanging out with a group of people that regularly engage in those sorts of efforts. I hadn’t, though, given thought to the other side of the coin, that the crowd you spend time with might negatively impact your abilities (other than ‘keeping you down’ because they are so low to begin with; this article speaks to the opposite: brainy people driving down their peers instead of incentivising them). Thinking back to my experiences I never felt like throwing in the towel when surrounded by a group of people that had some sort of edge on me (well, not intellectually; regarding sports I have never had any inclination to excel, except possibly for ice hockey), rather the opposite. The idea that people can play below their game because they are intimidated isn’t new either, in sports (hence ‘game’) you see that all the time, where a team that is out classed just can’t seem to get together. However, to me, the idea that people also play below their game in the intellectual arena is new. I have read anecdotal comments about certain groups (most often blacks in the US and the lower casts in India) doing much better on test scores when tested with their peers vs when tested with a wider population, but this is the first article I have read that mentions controlled experiments. The comment about the academy is also interesting. Perhaps it is also related to why some reports of same-sex education result in better scores among the ladies when other reports find mixed-sex education results in the best scores: it boils down to the socioeconomic environment and isn’t independently related to sex at all. If the ‘underprivileged’ (through socioeconomic status, educational background or ‘native’ ability) feel that they have no chance of winning they create a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts by giving up. However, if given a more appropriate level of challenge, they might actually supersede the brainiacs in the long run, just taking longer to do so (and possibly even not longer: less linear, more curved). This reminds me of a good friend from years back (Doug Cloud) who suggested that people with certain behavioral ‘ticks’ who are outcasts in our current society might have just ideal survival characteristic in other societies. He felt that a lot of people considered misfits in our current society might actually just need a mild bit of environment change to wind up being superior. Sadly, most of those people are treated poorly from a very young age and develop behaviors and habits that are objectively bad in any situation. Too bad in our current society there are no resources to even investigate these sorts of ideas. Who knows how many Einsteins are being forced to live on the streets because they don’t fit our image of a contributing member of society?
