Research published in Evolution and Human Behavior has found that people are more willing to harm their competitors when the competition is local.

The researchers used an economic game to show that people were more willing to inflict financial harm on others when they were competing against two nearby people, compared to when they were competing against the entire room of people. One hundred and sixty two people participated in the experiments.

PsyPost interviewed the study’s corresponding author, Jessica Livia Barker of Aarhus University. Read her responses below:

Why were you interested in this topic?

In general I am interested in cooperative behavior: that is, when people benefit others (sometimes at a cost to themselves), and there is a lot of research investigating the conditions under which cooperation occurs. However, people can also behave in ways to harm other people – and also often pay a cost themselves. You can think of this as the “opposite” of cooperative behavior, and it’s not very well studied – in fact, most research has focused on how people (and other animals) avoid paying costs. We know costly harming does occur, so in this study we wanted to find out why.

What should the average person take away from your study?

The study involved people playing an experimental game where they were competing with others to win a prize. When people were competing with only a small subset of players (“local competition”), they were willing to spend some of their own money to make those players lose more. This did not occur when people were competing with everyone playing the game (“global competition”). That means that the scale at which competition occurs – local or global – affects how willing people are to harm others. We all likely experience different scales of competition in different scenarios – for example, classes at school that are graded on a curve (local competition) versus based on absolute points (global competition) – so although we may not realize it, we have probably evolved to recognize the scale of competition in our everyday lives and to adjust our behavior accordingly.

Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?

The experimental game that people played was an abstract scenario, where voluntary participants came into the lab to play the game, and were given an amount of money to play with. Although we did an extra version of the game to check that people weren’t just willing to spend money on harming others because it was money they had arbitrarily been given, the study was still in a laboratory setting, so future studies could investigate real-life scenarios. The study also doesn’t tell us about people’s motivations or emotions related to harming others: future research could also address the cognitive mechanisms behind costly harming.

The study, “Local competition increases people’s willingness to harm others“, was also co-authored by Pat Barclay.