A Bigger Prize

Why do we worship competition even when it hurts us? In The Bigger Prize, Margaret Heffernan argues that our obsession with being first—whether in schools, corporations, or nations—produces enormous social, psychological, and economic costs. What looks like a clean way to pick the best actually hollows out trust, traps talent, and erodes long-term value. Her central claim is simple but radical: when you make winning the default measure of success, you weaken everything that makes collective progress possible.

Why competition feels irresistible

Competition promises clarity. There’s a score, a winner, and a sense of meritocracy. Heffernan begins with the demolition derby—spectacular, thrilling, and destructive—as the perfect metaphor for this mindset. We admire those who "win" under pressure and assume that rivalry automatically breeds excellence. Sports metaphors, Darwin’s misinterpreted ideas, and business clichés reinforce the belief that every domain should work like a contest. But this is a story, not a law of nature. As psychologists like Norman Triplett showed, people perform better against rivals only in simple tasks; complex challenges suffer when pressure turns social relationships into zero-sum battles.

The systemic damage of competitive thinking

Across domains, Heffernan documents how relentless competition produces hidden damage. Companies obsessed with quarterly results cut corners; schools racing for test scores narrow learning; nations chasing GDP rankings ignore health, equity, and sustainability. The same logic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma applies: when everyone plays for personal gain, collective outcomes worsen. You get doping in sports, fraud in science, exploitative labor conditions, and institutional silence instead of candor. Competition distorts incentives until cheating, exhaustion, and inequality become rational strategies.

How rivalry shapes the social brain

Heffernan traces this impulse back to childhood. Sibling rivalry trains our brains to seek status and attention. Neuroscientists like Allan Schore show that early attachment experiences wire the circuits for empathy and cooperation—or for dominance and withdrawal. Families and schools that allow competition to be expressed and mediated teach resilience; those that suppress or glorify it teach fear or arrogance. This is why leadership programs that prize charisma over listening often reproduce the pathology of the oldest brother trying to win at dinner.

The paradox of success

The drive to win can produce exceptional short-term performance but long-term fragility. In organizations, power concentrates and silences dissent (Michael Marmot’s Whitehall studies show how status gradients literally damage health). In science and sport, the tournament model rewards fraud and punishment rather than discovery or care. At a national scale, growth metrics mislead governments into false comparisons—GDP up, but wellbeing stagnant. Each sector mirrors the demolition derby: a theater of victory surrounded by wreckage.

The bigger prize: collaboration and trust

Heffernan’s answer isn’t naïve cooperation; it’s deliberate design. The book builds from concrete examples—Morning Star’s self-management, W.L. Gore’s flat teams, MIT’s mentoring labs, or Kenneth Feinberg’s 9/11 mediation fund—to show that collaboration only flourishes when structure, incentives, and culture all align toward trust. The real competitive advantage, she argues, lies in systems that make people safe enough to speak, creative enough to share, and responsible enough to act together.

Core idea

The deeper prize of human enterprise isn’t beating others—it’s learning how to build with them. Systems that harness shared purpose outperform those that glorify solitary triumphs.

You finish the book seeing competition not as inevitable but as a design choice. When winning becomes the only language of value, the futures we share are impoverished. The bigger prize—the one worth striving for—is the collaborative intelligence that lets everyone rise together.

Heffernan starts at home: the Hobbs family, a living laboratory of rivalry. Siblings Harry and his brothers fight for cake and attention; their behavior reflects an evolutionary logic—scarcity, status, survival—but filtered through modern culture. Families turn out to be prototypes of organizations and societies. How you handle rivalry in childhood trains your capacity for trust and empathy later.

How rivalry forms the social brain

Judy Dunn’s research confirms that infants compete for parental resources within months. When a new sibling arrives, attention-seeking intensifies. Yet the long-term effects depend on what parents do with conflict. Neuroscience (from kitten eye experiments to Schore’s brain development models) reveals that early emotional feedback sculpts neural connections: "cells that fire together wire together." Families that allow safe disagreement and reconciliation build circuits for empathy; those that punish dissent or reward dominance produce fragile egos or disengaged avoidance (Frances Schachter’s deidentification).

Constructive vs. destructive rivalry

Heffernan compares contrasting families: hypercompetitive environments that breed lifelong resentment (Diane Wilson’s fractured sibling ties) versus those that cultivate distinct, respected niches (the Bicat siblings who collaborate creatively). The lesson scales up easily: workplaces that give people ownership of different territories encourage cooperation; those that pit peers against one another suppress ideas and morale.

The pathways into teamwork

Rivalry doesn’t have to vanish; it can motivate learning when contained by trust. When you create a culture—at home, school, or work—where jealousy, loss, and failure can be aired, people gain emotional intelligence and resilience. As Heffernan emphasizes, collaboration isn’t born of kindness alone; it requires repeated practice resolving small conflicts safely.

Practical insight

If you give rivalry a safe outlet and model reconciliation, you build the social and neural structures that make collaboration a lifelong skill.

Heffernan’s microcosmic lesson is profound: families are the first economies of status and fairness. How you learn to share at five predicts how you’ll lead at forty. When rivalry becomes relationship, trust becomes the default—not the exception.

Modern education often mirrors the problem Heffernan critiques throughout: treating learning as a tournament. From preschool testing to college admissions, the system rewards compliance and speed over curiosity. You meet Justin Riley and Sarah Bonner at MIT—students who flourished only when a mentor like Charlie Shubert noticed their unconventional talents. Their stories expose how narrow educational competition wastes potential.

The ranking trap

The early sorting of children through GATE and ERB tests, the rise of tutoring industries, and the parental panic about placement all signal one thing: education as status contest. Students learn to perform for tests rather than to think. The psychological mechanism is clear from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination research: external rewards crowd out intrinsic motivation. Teresa Amabile demonstrated that surveillance and competition stifle creativity. A good test score measures obedience better than originality.

Models of curiosity-driven learning

Heffernan contrasts this with classrooms like the Blackawton Bees project, where children designed and published original research. Freed from standard constraints, they produced genuine discovery. Similarly, Finland’s education model, which minimizes testing and invests heavily in teacher development, consistently outperforms exam-focused nations. In each case, curiosity, equality, and trust—not competition—create excellence.

How to fix the tournament

If we want creative citizens, we must design schools around exploration, not elimination. That means smaller teacher-student ratios, delayed tracking, and assessments that capture how students think rather than what they memorize. The most effective reform isn’t more competition—it’s better collaboration among teachers, parents, and students.

Observation

When schools become arenas, the loudest win. When they become labs of curiosity, everyone learns.

Heffernan’s educational vision aligns with broader reformers—from John Dewey to Ken Robinson—arguing that curiosity and collaboration aren’t luxuries; they're survival tools in a complex world.

Heffernan dismantles the myth that women are naturally less competitive. What looks like biological difference is largely social context. Economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini’s cross-cultural work illuminates this: Khasi women in matrilineal India compete as readily as men, while Masai women in patriarchal Tanzania do not—because local norms punish women who act assertively. Competition, then, is curated by culture, not carved in DNA.

The social costs of competing

Linda Babcock’s negotiation studies show that women avoid negotiations not from fear but from rational expectation of penalty—being labeled aggressive or unlikable. When evaluation systems change, behavior changes. In blind auditions, women’s selection rates in orchestras soar. Cultural norms, not chromosomes, decide who competes and thrives.

Markets of intimacy

Heffernan extends this to personal life: dating and marriage operate as competitions structured by scarcity and status. From lavish weddings to property-driven mate selection in China, even love markets show how performance replaces connection. Both sexes internalize scripts that equate value with winning attention, not building relationship.

Changing the architecture of fairness

You can’t fix gender imbalance without redesigning the environment of success. That means reducing penalties for assertive women, reframing reward systems to honor collective contribution, and exposing hidden biases in evaluation. Inclusion arises from deliberate architecture, not simple exhortation.

Takeaway

When you change the costs of competing, you reveal capacities that had been suppressed, not absent. Equality is a design outcome, not a natural drift.

Heffernan’s argument moves the gender debate from nature vs. nurture to structure vs. signal. If you want genuine meritocracy, you must rewire the social cues that define who dares to enter the game.

Competition’s twin is hierarchy: once some win, others must lose. Using Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe’s pecking orders among chickens as metaphor, Heffernan explains how human hierarchies form quickly and harm both creativity and health. Status signaling—voice tone, gaze, body posture—decides who speaks and who stays silent. These unspoken cues create power-distance, a measurable social toxin.

The price of status distance

Geert Hofstede’s indices show how steep hierarchies correlate with inequality and reduced innovation. Michael Marmot’s Whitehall studies go deeper: low-status workers die earlier, not from poverty alone, but from chronic stress and loss of control. Neuroscience confirms it—stress hormones impair complex reasoning (Yerkes-Dodson Law) and scarcity narrows cognitive bandwidth (Mullainathan and Shafir). When organizations glorify competition, they lower collective IQ.

Designing flatter success structures

Companies like W.L. Gore, Morning Star, and Arup prove there are alternatives. Reducing power-distance increases transparency, error reporting, and innovation. When people can challenge upwards without fear, better ideas surface. Health and ethics alike improve.

Concept

Steep hierarchies produce scarcity mindsets and dull creative risk-taking. Flattening power structures frees cognitive bandwidth for problem-solving.

In short, inequality isn’t just unjust—it’s inefficient. The best organizations replace positional power with earned trust, converting status anxiety into collective strength.

The logic of “first past the post” infects even our highest callings: science and sport. Heffernan contrasts both as tragic case studies of how tournament incentives destroy integrity. In labs and locker rooms alike, the fear of losing drives deception.

Science as contest

Early scientific rivalries like Carl Djerassi’s cortisone race evolve into modern crises—fabricated data by Jan Hendrik Schön, manipulated results from Diederik Stapel, fraudulent experiments by Scott Reuben. The cause is structural: reward systems that prize publication counts and funding “wins” over verification. Retractions rise, trust falls. The Matthew Effect—fame accumulating to the already famous—locks newcomers out. Vijay Kuchroo’s lab reversed this by adding psychologists and open discussions, transforming culture from secrecy to learning.

Sports and self-destruction

From Olympic hopefuls like Dai Greene to NFL veterans with concussions, Heffernan shows that elite sport often functions as a slow-motion tragedy. The “Goldman dilemma” (would you take a fatal drug for victory?) reveals how fully the contest mentality colonizes ethics. Doping scandals—BALCO, Armstrong—illustrate markets where cheating becomes rational. Even the winners pay with health, identity loss, and isolation.

Repairing damaged incentives

Solutions lie in transparency and shared purpose: invest in reproducibility, team science, athlete welfare, and long-term funding over headlines. The Blackawton bees, Finland’s reforms, and Uri Alon’s improvisational lab culture all demonstrate that collective curiosity yields durable results while competition corrodes them.

Synthesis

When success is defined as being first, truth and wellbeing become negotiable. Redesign incentives to reward integrity and the prize grows larger for all.

Heffernan’s moral: systems built on fear of losing will eventually lose everything worth having. Those built on trust build legacies that last.

Even creative industries fall victim to competitive sameness. Heffernan calls it “clone culture,” in which safety masquerades as strategy. In music, film, and pharmaceuticals alike, the drive to copy proven winners produces stagnation—a crisis hidden in plain sight.

The Auto-Tune effect

Andy Hildebrand’s invention, Auto-Tune, started as a corrective tool; it became the default sound of pop. From Cher’s iconic hit to mass adoption by countless artists, the technology standardized voices and diluted character. Jay-Z’s protest track "Death of Auto-Tune" marked the cultural moment when authenticity itself became scarce. Heffernan’s point: competition for airplay can erase originality faster than technology enables it.

Algorithmic déjà vu

In Hollywood, algorithmic tools like Epagogix promise to predict hits, leading to endless sequels and reboots. Box offices fill temporarily, then collapse under audience fatigue. Pharma’s "me-too" drugs repeat the pattern: patented tweaks to old molecules yield giant profits but minimal therapeutic benefit (omeprazole vs. esomeprazole). Cloning feels safe—and kills innovation.

Real innovation is cooperative

Heffernan highlights open-source successes like Mozilla and cooperative ventures like the Medicines for Malaria Venture. When risk and reward are shared, creativity blooms. Method Home Care reinvented cleaners through design-led collaboration, proving that values-driven teams can out-innovate formula-chasers.

Core message

Copying wins short-term markets but drains long-term imagination. True innovation arises from open collaboration, not competitive cloning.

Creativity and risk-sharing, not imitation, are the engines of economic resilience. Clone culture destroys precisely what it tries to replicate—success.

Collaboration isn’t magic—it’s engineering. After diagnosing competition’s harms, Heffernan studies real organizations that outperform rivals by aligning purpose, trust, and structure. Companies like TechShop, Reallocate, Morning Star, Arup, and W.L. Gore reveal an alternative operating system where people work not for dominance but for shared purpose.

How trust scales

TechShop’s distributed makers build medical braces collaboratively; Morning Star runs on “colleague letters of understanding” instead of orders; W.L. Gore caps team size to preserve intimacy; Arup ties bonuses to firmwide profit, not individual conquest. These micro-designs create self-correcting communities. The principle echoes Robin Dunbar’s cognitive limits (~150 relationships): beyond that, you lose coherence unless you flatten power and align mission.

The studio principle: the best idea wins

Heffernan’s example from producer Jim Abbiss and arranger Rosie Danvers recording with Adele illustrates collaboration at human scale. They finished a masterpiece in three hours because everyone listened, iterated, and served the work. Fou Ts’ong’s insistence on learning the whole score and RADA’s group auditions teach the same skill: to respond, not dominate. Research supports it—MIT’s “c-factor” shows that team intelligence depends on equal talking time and social sensitivity, not individual IQ.

Blueprints for cooperative design

• Visible workspaces (wiki walls, open dashboards) let ideas travel.
• Explicit norms—“assume goodwill,” “yes, and”—encourage curiosity over defense.
• Employee ownership aligns incentives across levels.
• Small, autonomous units build trust faster than sprawling bureaucracies.

Design principle

You can’t tell people to collaborate—you must make it safe, visible, and worthwhile for them to do so.

When collaboration is designed with care, trust becomes contagious. The same mechanisms that make competition destructive—status, secrecy, fear—can be re-engineered into systems of learning and shared pride.

In her closing chapters, Heffernan widens the lens from firms to nations. The competition myth disguises itself as patriotism and economic realism, but nations too pay the price when they measure worth by rank. GDP, she argues, mistakes motion for progress. As Robert Kennedy once noted, it counts napalm but not the health of children.

The national scoreboard illusion

Global competitiveness indices reward deregulation and short-term efficiency, embedding ideological bias as objective truth. Heffernan instead points to the Boston Consulting Group’s SEDA index, which measures how well a country converts wealth into wellbeing. Small nations like Finland and Norway outperform giants because cooperation, not bravado, guides their design. Elinor Ostrom’s fieldwork on commons governance and John Sulston’s open Human Genome Project confirm: cooperation can outcompete privatized rivalry at scale.

When bigger turns brittle

Mega-corporations and megacities embody competition’s hubris. From BP’s disasters to RBS’s collapse, Heffernan shows how "too big to fail" means too complex to manage. Architect Frank Gehry’s monumental projects mirror the same vanity—grand, fragile, disconnected from human use. The solution: shrink the distance between power and consequence. Robin Dunbar’s research and firms like Baird demonstrate that human-scale organizations are more resilient, ethical, and adaptive.

Collective intelligence as the ultimate prize

The book ends with mediator Kenneth Feinberg’s work after 9/11—a real-world proof that cooperation can solve problems competition cannot. His trust-based compensation scheme protected victims and institutions alike. Across domains, Heffernan’s synthesis is moral and pragmatic: societies that prize fairness, transparency, and mediation gain stability and endurance.

Final message

The bigger prize isn’t dominance—it’s durable, collective achievement. When nations and organizations design for cooperation, they not only prosper longer; they play a game worth winning.

Heffernan’s conclusion reframes competition as a design question, not a destiny. She leaves you with a challenge: what if we built our economies, schools, and relationships not to beat others, but to make the most of each other?