Social Sciences Lecture Series | Prof. Dr. Márta Fülöp › view all

Perception of Competition and Social Change

Prof. Dr. Márta Fülöp (HUN-REN, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Hungary) on "Perception of Competition and Social Change".

Abstract

Studying social change in relation to the system change in the East-Central European countries in the 1990s was a very central focus of social psychologists in the region. In almost all post-socialist countries social and developmental psychologists studied how values change in relation to the political and economic changes. 
Competition is a social, political and economic phenomenon (Fülöp, 1999, 2005). Its perception and conceptualization can not only be different across societies, but can change over time and along with social and cultural changes within one society.
The talk will start with a brief introduction on how the attitude towards competition changed in the last century and then turns towards Hungary. Competition was a more or less banned concept in the socialist Hungary. However, it became a key concept of the so called system change. This change started more than 30 years ago therefore it is worth to investigate if and how the concept of competition has changed. The present talk compares the concept of competition between matched samples (age, gender, university major, same high-school) of Hungarian university and high school students. In the first study carried out in 2000 the so called Omega – Alpha generation took part (Van Horn et al, 2001) who were the last children of the previous system and the first adults of the new.  In the second study carried out in 2021-22 and 2024 members of the so called “Beta Generation” (Fülöp, 2018) who were already born into a structurally competitive society (democracy and market economy) participated. The goal of this study was to check if these views have changed or remained stable. Participants filled in a questionnaire with a main open-ended question: „What do you think about competition in general?“ The talk will present the main results (NKFIH-OTKA-K135963).