IB Psychology HLTopic 7 — MotivationHuman RelationshipsKey study~9 min read
Motivation in Sport and Teams
Is it better to work together or to compete? Coaches, teachers and managers argue about this endlessly. A study of boys shooting basketball free throws gives a clearer answer than you might expect — and it is not the answer either side wanted.
📘 What you need to know
Intrinsic motivation in sport means playing because the activity itself is satisfying — learning, improving, enjoying the game.
Tauer and Harackiewicz (2004) compared pure cooperation, pure competition and intergroup competition (cooperating within a pair while competing against another pair).
Intergroup competition produced the highest performance and the highest enjoyment.
Pure cooperation and pure competition produced similar results to each other.
Conclusion: cooperation and competition combined seems to be the best condition for intrinsic motivation in sport.
The sample was 36 boys at one American basketball camp, which limits how far you can generalise.
Why sport is a good place to study motivation
Sport gives psychologists something rare: a behaviour you can count. You cannot see how motivated someone feels, but you can count how many free throws they made, and you can ask them how much they enjoyed it. One objective measure and one self-report measure, in the same task.
It also puts other people into the picture. Once you add teammates and opponents, motivation stops being only about the individual. Are you trying because you enjoy shooting, because you do not want to let your partner down, or because you want to beat the boy standing next to you? All three can operate at once.
The study: three ways to organise the same task
Tauer and Harackiewicz worked with 36 boys in grades 7 to 9, average age around 12, at a basketball day camp in the USA. The boys were matched into pairs by basketball ability after a pre-test of their free-throw shooting, which controls for the obvious problem that better players will score more whatever condition they are in.
Read the bottom line of each card first. The design is really a two-by-two idea: do you have a teammate, and do you have an opponent?
What they found
Intergroup competition came out on top on both measures: the boys performed best and said they enjoyed it most. Pure cooperation and pure competition did not differ much from each other.
That second finding is the one students skip, and it is the more interesting half. It means the argument “cooperation beats competition” and the argument “competition beats cooperation” are both wrong on this evidence. What mattered was having both at once.
Enjoyment was measured by asking the boys, so it is self-report data — useful, but open to social desirability effects.
Why would having both work best? A teammate gives you a reason to care that is not about you. An opponent gives the task a point. Together they make the activity absorbing — and absorption is what intrinsic motivation feels like from the inside.
Evaluating the study
Strength
Limitation
Matched pairs controlled for ability differences
Only 36 participants, so low statistical power
Two dependent variables, one behavioural and one self-report
All boys, so the findings cannot be generalised to girls
Real sporting task rather than an artificial lab activity
One camp in one country, so low external validity
Clear practical use for coaches and teachers
Competition is valued highly in individualistic cultures, so culture bias applies
The transferability point is worth thinking through rather than reciting. The sample is narrow, so you cannot generalise the numbers. But the underlying idea — that people work harder and enjoy things more when they have both a teammate and something to beat — is about a situation, not about American twelve-year-olds. That idea transfers to classrooms, workplaces and any other setting where people are organised into groups.
Worked example
WORKED EXAMPLE
To what extent are these findings transferable to other populations or contexts? [6 marks]
Limit the claim first
Transferability is limited: 36 boys in grades 7 to 9 at one American basketball camp is a small, narrow sample, so it lacks statistical power and the boys probably came from one geographical area.
Name the biases
The findings are gender-biased, since no girls took part, and culture-biased, since competition carries particular value in an individualistic culture such as the USA.
Now argue the other side
The mechanism is more general than the sample. Being part of a team while competing against another team is a common situation, so the finding plausibly transfers to school sport, classroom group tasks and workplace teams.
Judgement
The specific results should not be generalised; the principle behind them reasonably can, if it is tested in each new setting.
Limits, biases, counter-argument, judgement“To what extent” always means both sides plus a decision. Answers that only list weaknesses stall in the middle band.
💡 Exam tip
Learn the three conditions by their social ingredients: teammate only, opponent only, both.
Always mention that pure cooperation and pure competition were similar. It shows you read the results properly.
Say which DV you are talking about — performance or enjoyment. They are different measures with different weaknesses.
Matched pairs is a design strength worth naming. It controls a participant variable that would otherwise ruin the study.
When evaluating transferability, separate the numbers from the principle. That distinction reads as sophisticated.
⚠ Common mix-up
Reporting “competition is best”. It was intergroup competition, which contains cooperation inside it.
Calling it an independent groups design. Participants were matched by ability, which is a matched pairs design.
Treating enjoyment scores as objective. They are self-report, on a scale the boys knew the researchers would read.
Saying “small sample” and stopping. Explain the consequence: low power, so real effects can be missed.
Forgetting the motivation link. The study is evidence about intrinsic motivation, not just about basketball.
Up next: Locus of Control and How People Act — why some people bend to social pressure and others do not, and how far locus of control really explains it.
Want this explained one-to-one?
Book a free session with an experienced IB Psychology tutor and get your trickiest topics made simple.
