Psychologists have been fascinated with the effects of competition on performance for a long time. Way back in 1898, Triplett found that bike racers were faster when racing against each other versus against the clock and similar research continues to this day. A recent summary suggests that competition can be both beneficial and harmful, depending on whether the competition encourages people to outperform others (performance-approach goal) or to avoid losing (performance-avoidance goal). Adding competition increases performance when people focus on winning, but adding competition hurts performance when people focus on not losing.
But can that same competition also improve your memory? That’s the question Zhenlaing Liu, Tiantian Liu and Yansong Li (pictured below) set off to answer in a recent article published in the Psychonomic Society journal, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
In particular, the authors were interested in the effect of competition on both true and false memories. They hypothesized that social competition would alter both how participants studied the information and how they responded on a final test.
To test the effect of social competition on memory distortions, the authors used the DRM paradigm. First used by Deese in 1959 and popularized by Roediger and McDermott in 1995, the task has people try to remember a list of related words (e.g., door, pane, shade, ledge, sill). Each list also features a related distractor word (e.g., window) that was not presented. When trying to remember the list, people often falsely remember seeing the distractor items.
In the current study, participants studied 10 lists of 15 words each and were then presented with a list of 60 words. For each word, participants judged whether it was “old” (presented on one of the lists) or “new” (was not on any list) and how confident they were in that judgement (9 point scale). The 60 words included 30 studied items, 10 related unstudied distractors and 20 unrelated distractors.
Before starting the experiment, half of the participants were told that they were competing against an opponent and that if their performance on the task was higher than their opponent’s they would receive a bonus payment. The other participants were told that they would receive the same bonus if their performance was above an unspecified criterion. Thus, all participants were motivated to do as well as possible, but only some felt social pressure.
Overall, social competition had two effects on memory. First, participants in the competition group were less likely to falsely recognize related distractors. As shown in Panel A below, participants in the control group were more sensitive to differences between the related and unrelated distractors than were the competition participants. (They were more likely to think that the related distractors had been previously studied.) However, there were no differences in the groups’ ability to distinguish between studied items and the unrelated distractors. The authors suggest that when people were competing with someone else, they focused more on studying each individual item, rather than relating the items to each other. This item-specific processing led to fewer memory distortions.
Second, as shown in Panel B, participants in the competition group were more conservative in their responses. When people thought they were competing with someone else, they were more reluctant to say that an item was “old”. This conservatism means that they often failed to recognize previously presented words as “old.”
So is competition good or bad for our memories? On one hand, competition is good because it reduces false memories, but on the other hand, it is bad because it also makes us more reluctant to judge previously viewed items as old. The true answer likely depends on the situation. If avoiding this type of memory distortions is vitally important than social competition can help achieve that goal. If, however, the goal is to remember as many items as possible, then competition may decrease performance.
Featured Psychonomic Society article
Liu Z., Liu, T., & Li , Y. (2021). How does social competition affect true and false recognition? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28, 292-303. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01807-7