Destructive Competition Despite of Compatible Goals: Social Feedback Shapes Conflict and Cooperation

Competing with others has costs and benefits, but it becomes solely destructive and spiteful, when everyone’s situation is worsened. We demonstrate that destructive competition can be observed in situations, where goals are fully compatible. By manipulating the format of feedback, we link the occurrence of destructive competition to the availability of social information allowing for relative comparisons. We observed these effects by studying participants’ contribution choices in public good games: Adding veridical social information to individual outcome feedback reduced cooperation when focused on relative gains and rankings and helped to maintain cooperation levels when focused on absolute group performance and efficiency. Explanations centering on mere confusion cannot account for these results. Feedback-structures seem to trigger value-destroying competition that designers of information environments – inside and outside the lab – need to be aware of.