Think about running as fast as you can alone, or next to someone else. If you are competitive, just having someone running next to you might motivate you to run faster and win an imaginary “race.” You just transformed an innocent situation into a competition. And if you’re less competitive, maybe you don’t care who’s next to you—you just run fast. As you might have guessed, we wanted to test whether young boys and girls would have different competitive tendencies.
