A colleague received an award, promotion, or employee of the month title. What do we feel about it? Envy and self-doubt due to the inevitable comparisons are not in our favor, or, on the contrary, a surge of strength and confidence that “he could, I can too”? It all depends on the relationship in the team.
To understand how comparison with others affects our confidence in ourselves and our abilities and what happens in our brains, British neuroscientist Marco Wittman and his colleagues conducted several experiments in which 24 volunteers took part.
Participants played games that required them to determine the color of objects with complex shapes or estimate elapsed time without a clock. At the same time, they were told that two more participants, whom they did not see, were playing the game at the same time. Before the start of each round, the participants were asked to guess what results they and two other participants were most likely to show, and after the end of this round they were told the real results of all three.
At the same time, the games were held in one of two options — «cooperation» and «competition». In the first case, the results of all three participants were added up, and in the second, on the contrary, those who performed worse than the others were deducted points. At the end of the experiment, you could receive a cash reward for the points you had earned.
It turned out that in a situation of «cooperation» the success of the partners gave confidence to the participants and they were more optimistic about their chances in the next rounds of the game. On the contrary, other people’s failures undermined the confidence of the participants. However, in the situation of «competition» everything was the opposite — the success of competitors reduced the participant’s self-confidence.
The successes of competitors make us nervous, but we perceive the successes of our colleagues as our own.
The researchers also studied the brain activity of the subjects during the game using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It seems that our ideas about ourselves and our abilities can, as it were, «merge» with ideas about other people from our social group.
The scan showed that one area of the prefrontal cortex was responsible for tracking the participant’s own performance in the game, while another area (called area 9) monitored the performance of other participants and seemed to connect information about both together.
Zone 9 helps to assess their own position in the hierarchy of their social group. At the dawn of evolution, it was important for man to quickly evaluate his capabilities in comparison with the capabilities of other people in order to decide whether to fight or flee, and which group to join.
In the course of evolution, our brain has developed mechanisms through which the success of “ours” is able to give confidence, because partly perceived as own. But the success of competitors makes us nervous, because it can be dangerous or unprofitable to enter into a confrontation with a strong opponent.
1 M. Wittmann et al. «Self-Other Mergence in the Frontal Cortex during Cooperation and Competition», Neuron, 2016, vol. 91, № 2.