{"id":18,"date":"2004-04-26T17:12:31","date_gmt":"2004-04-26T22:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=18"},"modified":"2004-04-26T17:12:31","modified_gmt":"2004-04-26T22:12:31","slug":"two-links-on-competitiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200404\/two-links-on-competitiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"Two links on competitiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"

By a remarkable coincidence, two of my readers sent me two links, both of them from the most excellent blog Marginal Revolution<\/a> and both of them deal with the impact of competitiveness on performance.
\n
\nThe first is from Nitin Pai, whom we encountered last sending us links on Forex reserves. An experiment<\/a> carried out in some village school in India found that making making caste salient<\/i> worsened the performance of both<\/i> lower caste and upper caste children. A mixed group of students were given a bunch of mazes to solve. The first time round, they were not told one another’s castes. Lower caste students performed as well as higher caste students. Then the castes of all the students were announced in class. The performance of the lower castes dropped really badly, and the performance of the upper castes dropped quite a bit too, but now there was a big gap in the performance between the two groups. The experimenters did a lot of interesting things that enabled them to conclude that the drop in the gap was not due to the decrease in confidence<\/i>, but because once castes were announced everyone started expecting that the competition wouldn’t be fair as the examiner would be biased. <\/p>\n

This of course means that caste discrimination is bad. It means most places of India where caste is almost your entire identity have a real problem on their hands. It also suggests that reverse discrimination<\/i> will not only be ineffective, but also make things worse<\/i> because it will keep caste salient. The lower castes will now be in the position of upper caste students in the experiment, whose performance dropped because they figured that they wouldn’t have to try too hard to do well.<\/p>\n

The second link is from Gautam<\/a>, who sent me this link<\/a> saying <\/p>\n

hi ravikiran, I remembered reading something you posted about the superiority of men, here is some more “proof” – Why men get paid more than women? : <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Far be it for me to say anything about the “superiority” of men. I am<\/i> a sexist, i.e. I do believe that men and women are different, but I don’t believe that one sex is superior to the other. If I said anything about superiority, it would be immediately qualified with “superior in < insert field here >”. He is probably referring to this post<\/a> where I said that women’s whims could lead to the destruction of the species<\/i> which is different from saying that they are inferior.<\/p>\n

In any case, on to the link. It apparently says that men are more comfortable competing in high-stakes games where the winner takes all. Women do better when they are competing with other women than with men. Interesting, but remember that even competitiveness is a genetically influenced trait. Men are more competitive (or foolhardy) because evolution selected them for the task.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By a remarkable coincidence, two of my readers sent me two links, both of them from the most excellent blog Marginal Revolution and both of them deal with the impact of competitiveness on performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}