Originally Posted by jayeff

The pyschology of message boards is interesting. Ask a certain question and most people who respond will choose the "right" answer that was implicit in the question or first post.

In this context, a couple of weeks ago someone asked who had cheated (at school, college, etc) and the majority said yes, even if most said only a little. Cheating makes no sense if you are your own judge, so you get one picture from that thread and another from this.

Despite the overwhelming number of people here saying they compete with themselves or "both", in reality the vast majority of people do not judge themselves by their own standards. It's contrary to human nature and you only need look around to see people constantly seeking peer approval in everything they do.

You could take it a stage further. Fewer people exceed the expectations you could reasonably have of them according to their economic circumstances at birth, than fail to reach those expectations. You could therefore argue that most people do not, in any wide sense, compete at all: certainly not very successfully. That again is human nature, a consequence of our being communal animals and as such, relatively few are genetically coded to be leaders. Most are coded to be followers.