Do you ever find yourself contemplating the psychology of the U.Va.-Virginia Tech rivalry? Just ask Arts & Sciences graduate student David Reinhard about it. Working alongside Asst. Public Policy and Psychology Prof. Ben Converse, Reinhard conducts research on how rivalries shape and change our behavior.
Reinhard specifically looks at how motivation and drive change as we compete against rival or non-rival competitors, and how this can affect our performance on tasks. Though there is ample research on competition generally, he said he was drawn to this topic by the general lack of rivalry research in psychological literature.
“Despite the prevalence of rivalries in a variety of domains (athletics, academics, business, art, etc.), there is little known about how rivalries differ from regular competitions and how these differences can influence our behaviors,” Reinhard said in an email.
Through his experiment-based research, Reinhard has found that thinking of a rival can increase an individual’s performance of simple tasks, but it can also decrease performance on tasks requiring deliberate thinking.
These results are based on the performance level of the subject when he is focused on a non-rival competitor. “We have found that rivalries trigger an action-oriented style of goal-pursuit,” Reinhard said. “[For instance], when given the opportunity to complete a practice round before being tested, participants thinking about a rival competitor were more likely to skip the practice round and go directly to being tested.”
These findings have implications beyond that of task performance, Reinhard said, suggesting that the data indicates subjects are driven by the direct relational components of rivalry, rather than the pressure or aggressiveness of general competition.
Reinhard is also studying how representation of rivals and non-rivals influence our actions — for instance, whether visual representations — mascots, logos and the like — change our motivations based on whether or not they represent rivals.
“Bringing to mind the mental representations of rivals may automatically activate the related relational components that in turn trigger competitive behaviors and motivational patterns, even when there is no direct competition present or even mentioned,” he said.
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