The Zero-Sum Bias: When People Think that Everything is a Competition - Deepstash
The Zero-Sum Bias: When People Think that Everything is a Competition

The Zero-Sum Bias: When People Think that Everything is a Competition

Curated from: effectiviology.com

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The zero-sum bias

A cognitive bias that causes people to mistakenly believe that one partyā€™s gains are directly balanced by other partiesā€™ losses.

This bias encourages belief in an antagonistic nature of social relationships

For example, the zero-sum bias can cause people to think that there is competition for a resource that they feel is limited, in situations where the resource in question is actually unlimited and freely available.

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Zero-sum bias effects

It can generally be said to affect people on two scales:

  • Individual scale. It causes people to mistakenly assume that there is intra-group competition for a certain resource, between them and other members.
  • Group scale. It causes people to mistakenly assume that there is inter-group competition for a certain resource, between their group and other groups.

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Examples of the zero-sum bias

Examples of the zero-sum bias

  • People sometimes view membership in social groups as being zero-sum: belonging to one social group excludes you from being a member of a different group.
  • People sometimes view gender hierarchies in the workplace as being zero-sum, which can cause them to be more opposed to gender-fair policies.
  • People sometimes believe that there is an inherent zero-sum competition between different ethnic groups, which can cause them to develop negative attitudes towards immigrants.
  • People sometimes view racism as a zero-sum game, meaning that they believe that a decrease in racism against one group will be balanced by an increase in racism toward other groups.

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Why we experience the zero-sum bias

  • Mistaken belief in limited resources: assumeing that a certain resource is more limited than is actually the case.
  • Mistaken belief in trade-off consistency:Ā assuming that there must be a tradeoff between the various advantages and disadvantages of each option, so that the options must be balanced overall.
  • Common correlations: certain types of tradeoffs or problems tend to be frequently correlated with each other, which can cause people to assume that they exist even in situations where they donā€™t.
  • Previous experience: people mistakenly assume that a certain situation is zero-sum because they were exposed to similar situations in the past that were in fact zero-sum.Ā 

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How to avoid the zero-sum bias

To reduce the degree to which you experience the zero-sum bias, you need to identify cases where you assume that a certain situation is zero-sum, and then assess the situation rationally in order to identify whether it is actually zero-sum, which you can do, for example, by asking yourself whether a resource under consideration is truly limited.

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