Maybe it’s just how the timing of
Gen Con worked out this year or perhaps it’s just lingering con-happy, but
these past couple of weeks have been such an all-around excellent unofficial
end to the summer. Don’t get me wrong, making all the costumes was definitely
fun, but after putting together four of them this year, it’s nice to just be
able to tinker around without a deadline looming in the periphery.
Another benefit of this post-con
hush is having the time to go back over the heap of notes I’d scribbled down at
one point or another and trying to parse through them. In the corner of one
notebook I’d jotted, “Why do we constantly try to one-up each other?” There was
no surrounding context, but that single line caused whatever other
investigation I’d been doing to grind to a halt.
Defensiveness set in almost
immediately. We don’t constantly try to do that. Other social groups
probably engage in one-upsmanship with the same frequency… And then the
memories and the stereotypes poured in. Well, maybe that’s
just my perception of a behavior. I'm clearly too close to the source material here. To the scholarly journals!
<<Cut to much reading of
various studies in an attempt to temper the selection bias inherent to me just
asking my friends and colleagues for their thoughts.>>
So given all this we can begin to
extrapolate a bit into the roles social comparison and direct social contests
play into our games of nerdy one-upsmanship. Let’s start with the first of the
major characteristics from the above paragraph: low or fragile self-esteem.
It’s no secret that many of us
had a difficult time interacting with our peers during our formative years and
that we often carry the resulting scars for quite some time. That shared experience of shame, bullying, and isolation lies like a bitter foundation
beneath our subculture. It’s one of the myriad reasons why some of us react
with hostility when we encounter newcomers as those would-be neophytes are
assumed (correctly or not) to have grown up having avoided our widely held
childhood fate. Correspondingly, many of us have constructed a large portion of
our sense of self from the body of knowledge we’ve built up in the pastimes
that sustained us through this turbulence. These hobbies sustained us, at least
in the figurative sense, and we often respond to that by giving ourselves over
entirely. Any subsequent challenge (or anything that is perceived as a challenge)
to that body of knowledge is translated as a threat to the identity we’ve
constructed for ourselves. Since the challenge is in an arena that we’re deeply
experienced in, the fight-or-flight response often ends up with the ‘target’
nerd selecting the former of those two options.
That’s usually how one-upsmanship
comes to pass in the context of standard self-esteem. However, a growing body
of research suggests that there is a wide variety of self-esteems or, probably
more accurately, states in which self-esteem exists[4].
People with fragile or otherwise unstable visions of self-worth often tie their
self-esteem directly to their last accomplishment or whom they are able to
impress. “When these individuals are doing well, they feel great or even
superior to others, whereas when they encounter setbacks, they tend to feel
shame and self-doubt.”[5]
So, in a community rife with individuals with low self-esteem AND who
characterize themselves upon the level of knowledge held on a variety of
shared, lauded topics, one-upsmanship seems like an almost natural reaction. We
can’t all know the most about Star Wars or Marvel or Lovecraftian lore. The
closest we come to détente is compartmentalization within our respective
circles of immediate friends. There’s a wordless understanding of, “Person X is
our D&D expert and Person Y is our go-to for physics.” Everyone gets to be
a specialist in something and thus everyone can feel confident in their personal body of
knowledge. This model functions so long as membership in the friend circle is stable
and tends to degrade if a new member is added or the circle encounters another
circle. Then it becomes, “Well all my friends know I’m the biggest Trekkie
there is and you, rival Trekkie, will have to be put in your place. There’s
only room for one of us.”
That last set of statements is
what professional psychologists call the Scarce Resources Model. I like to call
it the High Noon Saloon Model: there’s only room in this here saloon for one of
us. Under this schema we feel jealous and/or threatened when another nerd
exhibits more knowledge or skill because we (erroneously) believe that There Can Be Only One. The only way to prove that we are the best or most knowledgeable
is to publicly prove how superior the functionality of our cerebral matter is OR instill doubt in
the other geek’s purported skill. Hence one-upsmanship.
Sometimes the response we just
talked about isn’t derived from insecurity or poor self-worth, but rather from
the polar opposite. Narcissistic or highly self-centered nerds, “…do not see
others as separate human beings, but more as an extension of themselves, a
source of admiration for their accomplishments, a potential threat to their own
success, or as an object to use or manipulate in order to meet their own needs.”[6]
In this case the one-upsmanship is rooted in the notion of There Can Be Only
One, but the key differential is the motivation behind that model. Narcissists
believe that they are inherently the best and thus are the natural or even
rightful deserving One. Aggressive intrapersonal competition in this case is
often a combination of adverse reaction to reality being different than what
the narcissist holds to be true followed by a desire to bring the opposing ‘combatant’
low via one-upsmanship as an attempt to restore what the narcissist believes to
be the natural order of things. While I’ve separated these motivations for
one-upsmanship into separate categories I have a feeling that they’re not
binary and instead likely exist on a sort of self-esteem spectrum, but that’s just
a semi-educated guess based on personal experience.
So we have one-upsmanship derived
from poor/fragile/inflated self-esteem. We, as a subculture, also routinely
arrange ourselves in groupings that, as mentioned earlier, foster the most
intense degree of competition (instances with small numbers of competitors).
Lastly, we tend to do one other thing that may help explain why we sometimes
act the way we do: we regularly put ourselves in situations rife with
competition. Though cooperative board games make up a considerable and arguably
growing portion of their respective market and most tabletop RPGs are
inherently co-op, the vast majority of both board and video games are competitive in nature. The aggressive feelings that are conjured up in gamers during the
course of the game have been shown to dissipate following the game’s conclusion[7],
but there is a growing academic consensus that repeated exposure to the sometimes severe spikes in aggression may have consequences for our social skills later down the line. Having our competitive switches flick to 'on' at the drop of a hat after a lifetime spent playing against one another seems like a probable contributor to our sometimes aggressive behavior.
Oh man, I do, like, all of this stuff. Ok, maybe not all of it, but enough that I'm concerned. What do I do about it?
Like many of our other less savory behaviors, a good solid dose of self-reflection is a great place to start. If you think you've engaged in this sort of one-upsmanship, maybe ask yourself why you've done that. If you feel it's become an unwanted habit amongst your circle of friends, perhaps bring them in your thoughts and brainstorm ways to take some of the sting out of these exchanges. One of the most effective things to do with a person who feels they always need to be the smartest/craftiest/best is to provide gentle reminders that they're among friends. A simple, "hey, we're all friends here and we know who to turn to about [subject Z]," can go a long way.
Oh man, I do, like, all of this stuff. Ok, maybe not all of it, but enough that I'm concerned. What do I do about it?
Like many of our other less savory behaviors, a good solid dose of self-reflection is a great place to start. If you think you've engaged in this sort of one-upsmanship, maybe ask yourself why you've done that. If you feel it's become an unwanted habit amongst your circle of friends, perhaps bring them in your thoughts and brainstorm ways to take some of the sting out of these exchanges. One of the most effective things to do with a person who feels they always need to be the smartest/craftiest/best is to provide gentle reminders that they're among friends. A simple, "hey, we're all friends here and we know who to turn to about [subject Z]," can go a long way.
None of this is to say that competition is a bad thing. Far from it. The difference lies in the intent behind the behavior. There's a world of difference between a good, healthy show of skills and compulsive one-upmanship rooted in how we value ourselves. Let's aim for more of the former and exponentially less of the latter.
[1]
Greenberg, M. (2011). “How to Keep Your Cool with Competitive People.” Psychology Today. Accessed 3 September
2014 from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201109/how-keep-your-cool-competitive-people.
[2]
Vandegrift, D and Brian Holaday. (2012). “Competitive Behavior: Tests of the
N-Effect and Proximity to a Standard.” Journal
of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, Vol 5(3), August 2012, pgs.
182-192.
[3]
Corcoran, K., Crusius, J., and Mussweiler, T. (2011). “Social Comparison:
Motives, Standards, and Mechanisms.” In D. Chandee (Ed.), Theories in Social Psychology (pgs. 119-129). Oxford, UK:
Wiley-Blackwell.
[4] Corcoran,
K., Crusius, J., and Mussweiler, T. (2011).
[5] Greenberg,
M. (2011).
[6] Greenberg,
M. (2011).
[7] Anderson,
C. and M. Morrow. (1995). “Competitive Aggression Without Interaction: Effects
of Competitive Versus Cooperative Instructions on Aggressive Behavior in Video
Games.” Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin. Issue 21: pgs. 1020-1030. DOI: 10.1177/01461672952110003
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