The rat race

EMBO Reports (2019) e48528 “Every time a friend succeeds”, Gore Vidal quipped, “something inside me dies”. Though Vidal's peer group were writers, his remark captures a predicament that is common to novelists, scientists and indeed many spheres of human activity: your colleagues are your competitors. In science, that in‐group jostling occurs at every stage of the career ladder, from PhDs to postdocs and beyond. The “groups” need not be research groups per se, only collections of peers—as hapless junior faculty can find when they learn they are all vying for a single professorial appointment—but they share one characteristic that makes that competition psychologically viable: structural equivalence. This state was defined by the sociologist Roger V. Gould as occurring when two people have the same relations with the same third parties—such as two postdocs who either just started in a research group or are nearing the end of their term at roughly the same time. A consequence of structural equivalence is that the members of such groups are unaware of their relative standing in the pecking order and, as a result, more likely to come into conflict. A recent study by Piezunka et al [1] examined the implications of structural equivalence in a competitive environment. Analysing Formula 1 race data over a mind‐boggling 34‐year period, they found that the probability of two drivers crashing into each other—a manifestation of conflict, not bad driving—was highest when the drivers …