Playing to win: Student explores competition at boy’s basketball camp

There’s no I in team — and Brigette Wusterbath may have proved it with the help of her Hilldale research fellowship. In her study, the senior psychology student found that basketball players perform better as part of a team than they do individually.

Competition may be the common fabric of American life, but UW- Madison senior Brigette Wusterbarth finds something lacking in the winner- take-all game.

Wusterbarth, a senior in psychology and Spanish, tested her ideas on competition with the help of more than 100 energetic hoop dreamers at a boy’s basketball camp last summer in Minnesota. Through a series of tests at the free- throw line, the kids helped unravel a motivational riddle: Does the goal to win always translate to greater performance and enjoyment?

She compared three different goals at the charity stripe. One was pure one-on-one competition, one involved strictly team cooperation, and the third was a team-based competition. The results supported her prediction: Not only did boys in the team-based competition enjoy the game more, they averaged higher scores than the other two groups.

“I think it gave them the best of both contexts,” she says. “The competitive aspect was still there, but they were sharing team goals as well. It really pointed out the benefits of group competition.”

Wusterbarth shared her results during the Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Seminar in April. She was one of the 100 winners who last year received $3,000 Hilldale research grants, which connect undergraduates with faculty researchers in a year-long project. (See list of this year’s recipients.)

The topic has fascinated Wusterbarth for the last two years as a student worker in her faculty mentor’s laboratory. Psychology professor Judith Harackiewicz is a national expert on intrinsic motivation — people’s internal drive to do something for its own sake.

Her questions about why people enjoy what they do, and why some persist in spite of failure, have found that a win-at-all-costs goal can erode intrinsic motivation and reduce enjoyment.

Wusterbarth had a great opportunity for her study. Johnny Tauer, a graduate student in Harackiewicz’s lab, is a former All-American basketball player at the University of St. Thomas, where he runs an annual summer camp for Twin Cities kids. The environment was perfect for her study.

For the competition goal, students were grouped together based on similar abilities, and each shot 10 free throws with the goal of coming out on top. For cooperation, groups of two players worked together to improve their average free-throw percentage by one shot. Then she combined the two goals, and had the two-member teams cooperate with each other but compete with other teams for the best score.

Wusterbarth said the cooperation exercise was dead last, and competition second, in terms of both free-throw shooting performance and enjoyment. “It was the combination of the two that led to better results,” she says.

She speculates that the opportunity to work toward a common goal, mixed with the pressure of competition, seems to satisfy deeper motivations in people. It might help explain why team sports such as basketball enjoy much greater popularity than one-on-one events like tennis.

The results have obvious implications for the work place, she says. Rather than focusing strictly on individual competition, where one person’s success is linked with someone else’s failure, the team-based approach could lead to more productive work, she says.

But what about the university environment, where bell curves and GPAs make it the ultimate in raw competition? Another one of Harackiewicz’s students, psychology senior Nicole Denow, asked similar questions of a class of 172 students in Introductory Psychology 101.

Denow says she was interested in the goals students adopted for the course, and how that influenced their performance and interest. She studied performance goals, measured in wanting to get the best possible grade in class; and mastery goals, where students are motivated more by learning about subject matter than acing tests.

Her data showed that the mastery group ended up reporting that they learned more and had a more positive impression of the course, which translated to higher grades.

Denow says competition will always be important, but an obsessive focus on grades may shortchange students, especially those who plan to nurture their academic curiosities in graduate school.

Both Denow and Wusterbarth say they were fiercely competitive in their first two years at UW–Madison, but feel today like they have the luxury to pursue learning for its own sake.

Harackiewicz says it’s the right mix for college. “Good grades can get you admitted to graduate school, but intrinsic interest is what will keep you there,” she says. “Brigette and Nicole have both, and I feel lucky to have worked with them.”