A cognitive bias that causes people to mistakenly believe that one party’s gains are directly balanced by other parties’ 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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It can generally be said to affect people on two scales:
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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... you can attempt to negate the intuitive assumption that there is always a perfect link between actions and consequences, by using various debiasing techniques, and by examining the situation in question in order to analyze the possible action-consequence link in it in a rational manner.
For example, you could choose to openly display social proof or bandwagon cues, in order to signal to other people that there is support for whatever it is you are promoting.
Video-sharing sites demonstrate the benefits of displaying these cues, since people often use popularity cues such as the number of views that a video has in order to decide whether to watch it or not.