The psychology of asymmetric zero-sum beliefs.

Abstract

Zero-sum beliefs reflect the perception that one party's gains are necessarily offset by another party's losses. Although zero-sum relationships are, from a strictly theoretical perspective, symmetrical, we find evidence for asymmetrical zero-sum beliefs: The belief that others gain at one's own expense, but not vice versa. Across various contexts (international relations, interpersonal negotiations, political partisanship, organizational hierarchies) and research designs (within-and between-participant), we find that people are more prone to believe that others' success comes at their own expense than they are to believe that their own success comes at others' expense. Moreover, we find that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs only when thinking about how their own party relates to other parties but not when thinking about how other parties relate to each other. Finally, we find that this effect is moderated by how threatened people feel by others' success and that reassuring people about their party's strengths eliminates asymmetric zero-sum beliefs. We discuss the theoretical contributions of our findings to research on interpersonal and intergroup zero-sum beliefs and their implications for understanding when and why people view life as zero-sum.

Personal relative deprivation and the belief that economic success is zero-sum.

“…Consequently, upward comparisons may lead people to identify with anyone who is not well-off and interpret a zero-sum relationship between “the rich” and “the poor” as reflecting a relationship between “the rich” and “everyone else” (including oneself). Since people typically view others’ gains as coming at their own expense (but not vice-versa; Roberts & Davidai, in press), such broad identification with “the poor” may foster a belief that the rich gain at both one’s own and everyone else’s expense. On the other hand, people often view “the poor” unfavorably (Fiske et al, 2002), attribute their outcomes to internal failings (Davidai, 2021), and draw clear distinctions between themselves and worse-off others (Kuziemko et al, 2014).…”

“…Specifically, embedding the manipulation within slightly different dependent variables may have inadvertently primed participants to think about different manifestations of zero-sum dynamics, leading them to consider whether they gain at others’ expense or whether others’ gain at their expense. And, since people are more likely to view others’ gains as zero-sum than their own gains as such (Roberts & Davidai, in press), Studies 2A–2C may reflect this inherent asymmetry rather than a sense of deprivation.…”

If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

“…Recent work shows that, whereas white Americans believe that they are hurt by university diversity policies that mutually benefit white and non-white applicants, Black Americans accurately see these polices as helping everyone ( 12 ). This divergence may have something to do with the fact that people frequently believe that others gain at one’s own expense but that one’s own gains do not come at the expense of others ( 24 , 70 ). However, it also remains an open question how disadvantaged group members perceive policies that reduce societal resources but increase equality or, conversely, polices that increase inequality while increasing societal resources.…”

Is status a zero-sum game? Zero-sum beliefs increase people’s preference for dominance but not prestige.

“…However, although zero-sum beliefs may be influenced by broad, persuasive arguments like those presented in the videos, these beliefs do not exist in a vacuum. People’s subjective beliefs about the nature of social hierarchies are likely to be shaped by objective factors in their environments, including disparities in resource allocation between different employees (Davidai, 2021), organizational cues of impending losses (e.g., Sirola & Pitesa, 2017), the leadership styles of their managers and supervisors (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017), the salience of higher-income others (Ongis & Davidai, 2021), the stakes involved in promotion decisions (Roberts & Davidai, 2021), and so forth.…”

“…In Study 5B we therefore replicate this result with a much subtler and indirect manipulation of zero-sum beliefs. Because people are more prone to zero-sum beliefs when facing potential losses (Sirola & Pitesa, 2017), when feeling relative deprivation (Ongis & Davidai, 2021), and when experiencing psychological threat (Roberts & Davidai, 2021), we manipulated zero-sum beliefs by having participants contemplate their chances of losing (vs. gaining) rank in an organization. Despite reading about the same objective environment, we predicted that participants would be more prone to subjectively view the organization as zero-sum when contemplating potential status loss (rather than status gain) and, consequently, that they would exhibit a higher preference for dominance.…”