This has not been my experience in sports, not even remotely so. I was never once shamed for the sports I sucked at. Quite the opposite my teammates were always there to try to help me out and help me generally improve, even when I was playing shamefully poorly. There is a huge amount of bonding in sports, team and individuals, because you all go through the training together, losses together, and of course also the wins. School sports also have generally divisions: typically varsity, junior varsity, and then intramural. There's something for everybody.
If anything, the hardest part about sports is that you have to be the sort of person who can try their hardest, compete, lose and then use that as motivation to further improve yourself. Do you know how it feels to give something your all, and then fail - all in front of hundreds of people counting on you? And then come back from that? It's not easy. Behind any champion you're going to see a lot of pain and loss that they had to overcome. It's not like you're born a champ and everything is just easy. People of course are not equal, but the struggle is something we all deal with, and sports really helps with that.
So, to be clear, competition – with rewards, prizes, and medals – is a form of extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is often very powerful (gun at your head – also an extrinsic motivator – will motivate you to do what's asked). The problem, though, is that it's short-lived.
So if you were a sports minister who tries to maximize people's involvement in sports (at all ages), you would prefer to have more intrinsic motivation to sports, rather then extrinsic.
I would, of course, completely agree that intrinsic motivation > all. But I think you're also arguing something quite a bit different here than you were earlier. Rankings, in particular, are extremely important. They provide you a reasonably objective measure of seeing yourself improve, and they also help you determine who is a proper opponent for yourself.
In chess, for instance, a 200 point rating difference usually gives the stronger player an expectation of about 3:1. And ratings range from about 500 to just under 2900. So those ratings are absolutely critical in order to find an opponent at your skill level. In sport the exact same thing is true, with similarly wide scales of ability. I think the humility that rankings force upon one is also a very important part of sport and improvement.
So for instance about the Norway anecdote you gave (related to the prohibition on youth rankings from the 70s onward), Norway was always absolutely god tier at the winter Olympics, long before the 70s. In the 6 Olympic games from 1924-1952 they came in overall #1 5 times, and #2 once. In the 12 games since 1980, they've only came in overall #1 3 times. [1] Their total number of medals has increased, like everybody's, because many more events, and occasionally even new sports, have been added to the Olympics over time. I would not read much into this one way or the other, beyond pointing out that it's not a particularly relevant anecdote.
Great comment. I see you use rankings and ratings as synonyms, but there's a crucial difference here. Knowing that your level is 500 or 1200 (rating) is useful feedback for seeing yourself improve. Knowing that you're on the 10th place and someone else on the 1st (ranking) is much less useful.
The Nordic sports model is specifically against rankings for kids. It's fine to give them detailed scores or ratings or evaluations that help them improve. It's not fine to order their results and put them on a list of winners and losers.
Generally, sports feedback (and also goals) should be centered on things that you can control (like technique). Ranking – the place you earned in a competition or a tournament – is outside of your control, as it depends on the performance of others (and also on the quality of the judging and judging systems). Rankings are based on comparison and have a number of issues – take Uber ranking inflation, for example.
If your kid scored 3rd place in a competition – what does it tell you exactly about her/his technique or quality of coaching? Pretty much nothing. Only the fact that 2 other kids scored higher. Unfortunately, it's not rare in sports to see how the general national level of coaching in some sports goes down, while everyone still have their ranking and medals.
Using (measurable) ratings and scores as feedback also needs to be taken with a dose of caution. These systems are developed by humans, they're imperfect and usually measure only what is measurable. Sometimes, they're even wrong. Back to the IJS example – the system that was designed for Olympic-level athletes – it is often used for kids' competitions. For the lack of other options, judges enter entry-level elements into the system and assign base values. Instead of "quad lutz" it's a "shooting duck" entry-level exercise and assigns points to it. Then, judges pretend that they can "measure" this child's exercise – was it 0.4 points or 0.5? Needless to say, there is no actual measurement of "shooting duck" – it's just when all you have is a hammer, everything seems like a nail. Then, the parents fight over whose kid is judged more harshly. So, these systems can be pretty flawed.
And yes, of course, I don't attribute the Norway Olympics' success to the lack of competitions till the age of 11. Rather I'm showing that the policy of late specialization and withholding competition till kids mature a bit is not against the goals of high-performance sports.
I think our differences in perspective probably just comes from different backgrounds. My sports background is in wrestling, and there's extremely minimal ambiguity in scoring there. I think I can empathize with you on these issues in sports like figure skating where scoring may be "objective", but complex enough that it starts to become subjective again - perhaps like boxing in some ways.
And in general I am very much a fan of avoiding excessive extrinsic motivation. For instance I loathe, with a passion, participation trophies. Because I do agree that this results in people participating only for those trophies rather than for the sake of the sport. But where we may differ, perhaps, is that I do very much think that excellence should be rewarded and recognized. Not even just for the sake of those victors, but as a model for other people to strive for. And, in any case, if somebody is good enough at basically anything to be #1 in it, they're already going to be driven intrinsically, or have crazy parents... but that's another topic!
I think you are right. While I'm interested in sports governance/economics/history as a whole, I'm mainly dealing with figure skating, so biased towards the problems of this sport. Boxing rankings are fun, by the way. As far as I understand none of the four (!) sanctioning bodies in boxing have implemented anything resembling a mathematical model for rankings.
Re: extrinsic motivation. SDT (Self-Determination Theory) actually has quite a lot of studies on this matter. See Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) as an example [1] If you're designing reward/incentive system and want to maximize intrinsic motivation, what to choose – reward for showing up, reward for doing a task, reward for doing great or reward for winning?
Here is a quick breakdown of these contingencies:
1. Task-noncontingent – Reward is given simply for being present and does not specifically require actually being engaged with the target activity.
2. Engagement-contingent – Reward is given for spending time being engaged with the target activity.
3. Completion-contingent – Reward is given for completing a target activity (sometimes within a time limit).
4. Task-contingent – Refers to a larger category containing both engagement-contingent and completion-contingent rewards.
5. Performance-contingent – Reward is given for reaching a specific performance standard, for example, doing better than 80% of other people who have done it.
6. Competitively contingent – Reward is given to the winner of a competition and the loser gets lesser or no rewards.
Simplifying a bit, the results are – the further you go from 1 to 6, the stronger the detrimental effect on intrinsic motivation. In 6, for example, intrinsic motivation can be sustained only for the winners (because it carries a strong positive competence signal) but undermines it for everyone else.
Note that it's not always bad. In a private company, you may want to get rid of "underperformers", so rewarding excellence works fine.
I think this is quite strongly rebuked by nearly all of history. Things like participation trophies are quite a modern invention, at least in anything like the scale they have now. In the past it's not like there was some dramatically reduced desire to compete, if anything it may have been much higher.
Anecdotally I'm sure you can also rebuke such, as can I. In sports and games I did do well in, I obviously did not start out amazingly, nor did I receive any accolades or such for merely existing. Yet I went on to thrive in a number of sports/games, in no small part because I wanted to reach the top.
And the same is true of endless household names. E.g. Michael Jordan is quite famous for having been a bench warmer until he hit a growth (and competence) spurt, which started to transform him into the beast he would become. It's not like he just quit when he was relatively weak.
The incidents of competitors which started and stayed at the top, through ever more stringent competition, are very much the exception, and not the rule. Yet if your above hypothesis was correct - they're pretty much all we'd see!
Well, it's not my hypothesis at all :) The link I posted is a review of the literature on the topic.
I think the real problem with "participation trophies" is that it has very low competence signal. Not negative. But very low for everybody, regardless of performance. The winner's prize, at the same time, gives an extremely positive competence signal to the winner (at the expense of the negative signal to everybody else).
Again, if you put yourself into the shoes of a designer of an incentive structure, then you are facing a trade-off here. Do you want more people to keep doing this activity, or do you want to single out top performers? In sports, I believe it's more of a cultural element. Scandinavian countries, for example, are notorious for their culture of not expressing their personal success (Janteloven). That fits well with the Nordic sports model. More individualistic countries or post-soviet countries with "win at all costs" sports ideology tend to favor incentive structures optimized for early top performers.
With due respect you're begging the question here. The hypothesis you linked to is just that - a hypothesis. And it simply fails when looking at the past where there was both high sports participation, no such thing as participation trophies (again generally speaking - I'm sure some event some where had them, but they were not even remotely normalized), and winners were recognized. It also fails to explain why athletes often come from backgrounds of struggle. Or why athletes when faced with stronger competition (such as moving from JV to varsity, high school to college, etc.) don't just suddenly give up, and so forth, and so on.
Ultimately I strongly disagree that participation trophies incentivize participation, as well as that merit trophies discourage it. It is plainly illogical. I'm certain I could dig through the study and find a way that their methodology could easily lead to false conclusions, but I'm not terribly interesting in doing so, and in any case such a thing would be highly unlikely to be persuasive anyhow - because we aren't arguing that study, but our own personal biases. And, like with just about everything, there's extensive evidence for whatever side you want to argue.
I don't see any contradiction here. Merit trophies do increase motivation, but only for small subset of people, and decrease for the rest. It's also important to note that we're talking about statistical nature of things here. Competition sends negative competence signal to majority of participants, but it's not the only competence signal – parents, coaching and even culture in club also play a role.
Same goes for other key needs in SDT – autonomy being most important. Here is a study of swimmers and their drop-out after 10 and 22 months after assessing their coaching styles (autonomous vs controlled). [1]
Competition prizes are also form of extrinsic motivation ("external regulation" to be specific). Extrinsic motivation can be (and often is) very powerful. It just don't last.
I would rather we speak humanly, rather than in the intentional obfuscation of language that's ubiquitous in social science to make simple concepts, which are often little more than a researcher's personal biases wrapped in obfuscation, sound 'sciency.' Einstein's paper on special relativity is a zillion times more readable than that 'thing' you linked to which is nothing more than a little survey!
Back to speaking like humans, the thing you are not responding to is expectations vs reality. Participation trophies are near ubiquitous in places like the US, and there's an ongoing attack on merit across a wide array of domains - let alone efforts to recognize and reward it. Were this having the effects you claim, would you not expect to see absolutely skyrocketing sports participation? In reality it's down, in many areas sharply so.
That's interesting. For me that paper is more than readable – probably because I know all the terms, as I studied SDT extensively. But I can understand how terms like "introjected" can sound alien.
Before replying to expectations vs reality, we need to establish and agree on facts. Are you saying that in US, across all states and all sports, competition prizes has been replaced by participation trophies and you see a negative trends in sports participation?
It's "readable" in the most technical sense of the word, but it's exceptionally obfuscated and needlessly convoluted. Whatever that paper is trying to say could be succinctly and clearly expressed in a page or two, at most. But it wouldn't look as what the authors perceive to be "sciency", because behind the grandiloquent language is invariably a pretty simple premise and experimentation (or a survey in this case) invariably designed to confirm biases, rather than challenge them. It's ubiquitous in the social sciences (see: Sokal experiment) and only going to get much worse with the advent of LLMs that will enable streamlined obfuscation.
And no I'm (obviously?) not speaking of every single instance, as for a topic like this there will always be some exception or another. I am saying that as an aggregate - sports participation is down, and participation trophies are up.
If anything, the hardest part about sports is that you have to be the sort of person who can try their hardest, compete, lose and then use that as motivation to further improve yourself. Do you know how it feels to give something your all, and then fail - all in front of hundreds of people counting on you? And then come back from that? It's not easy. Behind any champion you're going to see a lot of pain and loss that they had to overcome. It's not like you're born a champ and everything is just easy. People of course are not equal, but the struggle is something we all deal with, and sports really helps with that.