Magic and Meritocracy

This chapter investigates the popular religious and magical dimensions of meritocracy. It focuses on the aleatory aspect of uncertainty, which is derived from interpersonal competition and uncontrollable random events. It also explores how people employ magical concepts like fate, luck, and karmic merit to explain the vicissitudes of success and failure and describes the magico-religious dimension of meritocracy as an integral part of the examination life. The chapter cites the participation of teachers in school prayers, which represents a de facto concession that merit, as orthodoxly conceived, cannot by itself determine the outcome of the Gaokao and the students' lives. It explains how people supplement orthodox social reciprocity with cosmic reciprocity by attributing to luck and fate, which cannot be explained by diligence, persistence, and composure alone.

Mortality threat mitigates interpersonal competition: an EEG-based hyperscanning study

Awareness of death has been shown to influence human cognition and behavior. Yet, how mortality threat (MT) impacts our daily social behavior remains elusive. To address this issue, we developed a dyadic experimental model and recruited 86 adults (43 dyads) to complete two computer-based tasks (i.e. competitive and cooperative button-pressing). We manipulated dyads’ awareness of death [MT vs neutral control (NC)] and simultaneously measured their neurophysiological activity using electroencephalography during the task. Several fundamental observations were made. First, the MT group showed significantly attenuated competition and slightly promoted cooperation. Second, compared to NC, MT significantly decreased gamma-band inter-brain synchronization (IBS) in the competitive context, which was associated with increased subjective fear of death within dyads. Notably, those effects were context-specific: we did not observe comparable results in the cooperative context. Finally, a machine-learning approach was successfully used to discriminate between the MT and NC groups based on accumulated IBS. Together, these findings indicate that MT to some extent mitigates interpersonal competition, and such mitigation might be associated with changes in gamma-band IBS.

Interpersonal competition in organization: an investigation of antecedents

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the antecedents of the competitive pressure felt by individuals in organizations.Design/methodology/approachThe data for this study are obtained from workers from multiple firms in various industries.FindingsThe results indicate that employees have a strong feeling of competitive anxiety and a sense of rivalry when their tasks are interdependent to one another, when they have a competition-oriented personality and when the relative evaluation scale is used for performance appraisal. The perceived proportion of performance pay only increased the sense of rivalry, while it did not increase the competitive anxiety. Also, intrinsic motivation and transformational leadership help mitigate both competitive anxiety and sense of rivalry.Practical implicationsThe author recommends that managers utilize these factors to maintain an appropriate level of competition depending on their organizations' needs.Originality/valueThe original value of this study lies in its attempt to examine how competitive mindset is developed among interpersonal relationships in organizations.

Feeling Like an Imposter: The Effect of Perceived Classroom Competition on the Daily Psychological Experiences of First-Generation College Students

Many college students intend to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers but quickly abandon these goals when confronted with notoriously competitive STEM courses that often pit students against each other. This emphasis on interpersonal competition could be especially detrimental for first-generation (FG) college students, an underrepresented group in STEM fields which more strongly values communality and collaboration relative to their continuing-generation peers. Thus, FG students may experience more imposter feelings in STEM courses perceived as having a competitive culture. A longitudinal study (with 818 students and 2,638 experience-sampling observations) found that perceived classroom competition was associated with greater daily in-class imposter feelings among all students—but especially among FG students. Imposter feelings in turn predicted students’ end-of-term course engagement, attendance, dropout intentions, and course grades. Classroom competition and the imposter feelings it engenders may be an overlooked barrier for promoting the engagement, performance, and retention of FG students in STEM.

Taipei Gay “Bear” Culture as a Sexual Field, or, Why Did Nanbu Bear Fail?

Inspired by the classical triptych of field, capital, and habitus, Green formulates the sexual fields framework to account for the current unprecedented expansion of specialized erotic worlds. In this essay, I analyze fieldwork data to ethnographically map the contours of the sexual field of Taipei’s gay Bears. After tracing the origins of the Taiwanese Bear through Japan and ultimately back to the US, I critically examine the interactions of the sexual fields framework’s core components. I make two conclusions here. First, Bears accumulate sexual capital through their bodies and the clothes they wear and rely heavily on social media to attain and retain sexual status. Second, while the Bear originally celebrated somatic diversity, interpersonal competition increasingly homogenizes Taipei’s Bears attire to reveal the limits of Bear sociability. Through this essay, I contribute to the growing body of sexual fields research.

Food as a Means for Female Power Struggles

Food often brings to mind diet and health, but it also has important social functions. Food is about so much more than just caloric intake and providing nourishment to oneself and others under one’s care. It signals, for example, care about oneself and others by means of careful planning, preparation, and consumption. After reviewing several perspectives on the social dynamics of food, this chapter connects food to women’s intrasexual competition. Specifically, it addresses how cooking and food intake are self-promotion strategies, not only due to one’s demonstration of an excellent domestic ability to a potential audience but also by boosting one’s physical attractiveness via controlling food intake. While there exists little direct, empirical evidence on the relationship between interpersonal competition and food preparation and consumption, research from a wide array of topics offers support. The chapter closes with numerous directions for future research in the area of food studies.

Competition against common sense

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into peer-to-peer (P2P) lending which has served as one important tool to mitigate financial exclusion. The main proposition of this research is that P2P platforms, which in many ways resemble auctions, naturally instill competitive mindset among lenders; furthermore, given only limited objective decision criteria, certain borrower personal characteristics fuel interpersonal competition enough to impact lending decisions in suboptimal ways. The two experiments support this proposition. As the result, while P2P lending offers unprecedented financial opportunities to some consumer groups, it may unintentionally exclude others, and even pose threat to the financial well-being of lenders. Design/methodology/approach – Two experiments were used to collect data and are reported here. Rigorous pretesting of manipulation stimuli preceded a pilot (exploratory) and the main experiment. Findings – The authors generally find a significant age bias, where ceteris paribus, younger borrowers are offered lower loan amounts as lenders most likely infer greater risk and lower likelihood to repay loans on time. However, and perhaps more interestingly, when age is not a strong indicator of experience (as in the case with 30 something), the authors repeatedly find evidence of lending decisions driven by interpersonal competition: more attractive and financially successful loan applicants of the same gender as lenders are most likely perceived as a personal threat, decreasing lenders’ confidence, which subsequently results in lower amounts being invested into loans that are possibly the most promising. Originality/value – To the best knowledge, this research is first to demonstrate the impact of interpersonal competition on decision making in the context of P2P lending. Furthermore, this paper contributes to better understanding of P2P lending as a tool to allay financial exclusion, while raising concerns of possible unintended exclusion of certain consumer segments due to the competitive nature of P2P platforms.