46 ms·

The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition

• zwkrt 7y ago
  I see people interpret personal comfort as zero sum and it drives me nuts. Like somehow other people being safe and comfortable devalues ones own safety and comfort.
  • wayoutthere 7y ago
    I suspect it is because many humans derive self-worth from seeing other people who are worse off than they are. If you have that mindset, personal comfort really can be a zero-sum game, sadly...
    • doc_gunthrop 7y ago
      What you just described is rivalry-based schadenfreude. > Rivalry-Based Schadenfreude is individualistic and related to interpersonal competition. It arises from humans' desire to stand out from and out-perform their peers. Another person's misfortune elicits pleasure because the observer now feels better about their personal identity and self-worth, instead of their group identity.
      • wayoutthere 7y ago
        I actually believe this effect is responsible for most of the racism we have in the US. Black people are an easily identifiable “lower class” who aren’t supposed to have power over white people or have higher social standing. A lot of Americans were irrationally angry at Barack Obama as a result.
        • wpietri 7y ago
          And that's no accident. I'm currently reading Kendi's excellent "Stamped from the Beginning". He goes into a fair bit of detail how early in the US's history poor whites allied with poor blacks in pursuit of better economic equality. The white elites quickly recognized this as a problem and worked to turn poor white people against the black population. We're still paying the price today.
          • barberousse 7y ago
            W.E.B. DuBois wrote about this same exact scenario a hundred years ago as well, though writing about the reconstruction period in the South after the war
    • 0815test 7y ago
      Protip: please don't say "humans" when you can just say 'people', or even 'folks'! It makes you sound a lot more, well, human, and less like a poorly-programmed, clunky robot. Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/style-guide-not-sounding-like-an-evil-robot/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/style-guide-not-soundi...
      • perfmode 7y ago
        this feels like a superfluous nit
        • wayoutthere 7y ago
          Thank you human :)
      • jtms 7y ago
        Protip: No one cares about this
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    Could you give some examples?
    • Chris_Chambers 7y ago
      Nightmare mode: Give examples without pivoting to a completely unrelated discussion about Trump supporters who want the fruits of their own labor to go to their own children rather than to strangers.
    • zwkrt 7y ago
      What I was thinking of as I typed that comment was people who begrudge increases in the standard of living for those in poverty. I see this in two forms. The first and most direct form I see is when people don’t want minimum wage to increase because it means their own wage becomes closer to the minimum. The second and more insidious form I see is in judging the entire concept of “poverty” in a critical light. I recall my mother being furious that the average person below the poverty line had a color TV (this was in the 90s). I would think in a progressive and loving society we might celebrate the fact that what we consider our poorest citizens have access to technology and new niceties.
      • roenxi 7y ago
        > I recall my mother being furious that... I'm going to be the first to acknowledge that you know your own mother a lot better than I do; but strictly from what you've written that is a defensible position. Most of the readers here live in a society that is extremely compassionate compared to most historical societies; one where there is constant political pressure for the people who make good decisions to support those who make bad decisions. If some impoverished person is going into debt or spending the last of their savings to buy a colour TV, that is money that someone who is relatively well off is going to have to make up later, eg, when our poor friend comes up against unexpected medical expenses. And a colour TV is pretty much a pure luxury that will further cause them to waste time not improving themselves or the world around them. I'm not about to start shouting at anyone; but being a cautious person who prepares for many contingencies is very frustrating because if you build up a financial buffer against things going wrong you have to start picking up the burden for people who not only made stupid choices, but don't realise it. Simply don't acknowledge that they were stupid and also would make the same choices again with enthusiasm. I don't even mind supporting a few people who are just lazy, but supporting someone who won't acknowledge that they are actively making their situation worse is miserable.
• atian 7y ago
  People are also dumb.
• boringuser1 7y ago
  This feels like a 'stop looking out for your own interests, it's OK because I said so'. H1bs are definitely zero sum.
• umvi 7y ago
  This will be controversial, but this is true everytime there is a pitchfork-inducing "the rich got richer in 20XX" thread. But it's not that the rich stole from the poor in order to become richer (though undoubtedly people will argue this). If I stick a million dollars in an index fund and passively get richer, am I stealing from the poor? Wealth is not zero sum, yet we seem to treat it like it is (in order for poor people to become wealthy we need to take from the wealthy)
  • 13415 7y ago
    The question is not whether someone steals or doesn't steal from the poor. The crucial questions are whether the divide between rich and poor increases or not and whether the actual buying power of the poor decreases or not. If the lower income classes have less and less, then something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. That's currently the case in most Western industrialized nations. One way to fix the problem, in one way or another, is by some form of resource distribution. If someone has got other recipes that could reasonably be expected to work, then they should put them on the table. So far, the "trickle down to the masses" methods favored by the ultra rich have not proven to be very successful and people cannot be bullshitted forever (or who knows, maybe they can, we'll see in the future).
  • gamegoblin 7y ago
    Not that I necessarily agree with them, but some people would say that your index fund is stealing from the poor in a sense, because corporate profits (distributed to you, the shareholder, as dividends) are derived from exploiting the working class, when they could be raising wages instead. This is obviously not the entire story, because the economy certainly has grown historically and continues to grow, and that growth comes from somewhere. But it is plausible that some amount of wealth accumulation does come at the detriment of the poor.
    • davesmith1983 7y ago
      Well labour prices (for whatever the industry is) is driven by market forces. The Salary / Rate has to match the market expectations. If the market rate is artificially inflated (minimum hourly wage) then companies will find a way to automate those jobs away. I am sure people will say that this would have happened anyway with certain unskilled labour jobs but you could argue that this only further incentivises them. I would argue that the UK fast food chains and supermarkets are a good case study to illustrate this. In the UK most of the cashier staff are slowly being removed. Now they normally have 6 - 10 checkouts that are automated and have the customer scan their own items. Tesco (that where I normally go) instead of having 10 checkout staff you can buy 10 machines that are managed by one or two people at most. All the machines in the major supermarkets are using the same vendor for their machines and the software appears to the same for each supermarket but skinned, with the only exception being the german supermarkets. Similarly at the other end of the scale in the UK. A C# .NET + MVC + JS with some SQL Server experience contract rate is about £350-400 a day. In London because developers expect higher rates (and the higher cost of living pushed the rate up by about £100-200 a day.
• verroq 7y ago
  A common one on HN is cryptocurrency energy use. If crypto didn't exist that energy would have been "wasted" on something else.
  • dboreham 7y ago
    There's a huge hole in the ground a 100 or so miles from me and several trains a day rolling up the valley that would disagree with you.
• gnicholas 7y ago
  > people tend to assume that if a product is superior in one dimension then it must be inferior in other dimensions. Assuming price is one of the dimensions, this is generally a true statement. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of best-in-class products that are cheaper than inferior competitors. This can occur for products sold at massive scale and with large tooling costs. This dynamic enables the producers of premium products to manufacture at lower cost than smaller-scale competitors. But usually they don't set their prices lower--they just enjoy higher profits.
  • gravypod 7y ago
    Would this be dissimilar to undercutting a competitor? For example Ryzen 3rd gen chips seem to out perform, and undercut the price, of Intel chips with a similar feature set. Maybe brand is a dimension?
    • GrapeFriedNiggr 7y ago
      Brand is certainly a dimension in some cases (see: Apple products) but it's inconsistent per consumer.
    • gnicholas 7y ago
      Sometimes this happens for a period of time, but in the medium- or long-run, the manufacturer of the superior product will raise prices. Undercutting is just a way of getting attention in the short-term.
      • neaden 7y ago
        The other alternative is that the inferior and more expensive version simply stops being produced.
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      Wait until tomorrow until you say that, the third party benchmarks aren't out yet. ;)
  • nostrademons 7y ago
• petra 7y ago
  Modern Life is so complex. And in many situations , telling whether they're zero sum, is uncertain, and hard. Look at the debates here for example. So people default to what they already generally know. They know that society is very competitive. The job market is very competitive. The mating market is very competitive. Zero sum games are everywhere. So it's no wonder they have this cognitive bias.
  • jlawson 7y ago
    It's not just that. Zero sum let's you shift blame for your own failures. You can say someone else took it from you (nefariously). When the game is positive sum, the cause of failure must be internal. You just couldn't do it and there's nobody to blame but you. A lot of people can't handle this. Entire philosophies and like outlooks are driven by this. The external locus of control.
    • lotsofpulp 7y ago
      I disagree that a positive sum game implies an internal cause of failure. Easiest example is inflation. You can be gaining positive ground, but not quickly enough to outrun the entity outside of your control who can wipe out your assets unless you stay ahead of the curve. This is true for many people who didn’t invest in the right capital such as certain real estate, equities, or intellectual property, as efficiency and automation gains means less of the labor is needed. One can claim it’s an internal failure to not invest in the right things, but it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to have that kind of foresight.
  • TTPrograms 7y ago
    None of those markets are really zero-sum. People value different things in all of those markets (jobs etc). Zero-sum is an edge case.
    • petra 7y ago
      Interesting answer. The people aiming for a certain position or role mostly care about similar things though. So don't they play a zero sum game ?
• GrapeFriedNiggr 7y ago
  One thing that grinds my gears is how the article is shoehorning all these examples of zero-sum bias into a precisely zero-sum situation. It doesn't actually have to be zero-sum for that "bias" to become rational. For example, prisoner's dilemma (which would actually better describe most of the situations put forth in the article).
• xondono 7y ago
  The textbook example of zero-sum thinking is how most people (specially those involved in politics) talk about imports and exports.
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    All trade is a victim of this. In reality, trade always creates value, and you can argue that all wealth in the world is created from trade, most of it interpersonal. But people still feel instinctually that each transaction has a winner and a loser.
    • luckylion 7y ago
      That'll likely depend on the definitions of trade and winning/losing. If you're starving and I'm the only one around and I sell you a loaf of bread for a million dollars, did we both win? Sure, you'll live another week, but I sold you a bread that you'd usually pay a few bucks for and got a million in return. If I'm paying the mafia for protection, do we both win? Sure, my restaurant doesn't burn down, but if the mafia didn't exist, it wouldn't burn down either. What about forced trades without perceived value, like a mandatory membership in organizations whose services you don't care for? What do you gain, besides not being thrown into jail?
      • BurningFrog 7y ago
        It certainly does depend on the definitions. The unstated assumption is voluntary trades in a system of private property rights. Under those conditions, neither side will agree to the trade unless they benefit from it, so value is created for both sides. So the mafia protection fee is a robbery, not a trade. The mandatory membership probably too. The bread loaf is a trade, and both people undeniably profit. Emotionally, it feels "exploitative", but if you think about it, things are less clear. In reality, people stock up food to be prepared to sell it during famines in order to make profits. But this is often made illegal as "profiteering", and as a result no one stock up food, and more people die when the famine comes.
    • rightbyte 7y ago
• benj111 7y ago
  "People sometimes view gender hierarchies in the workplace as being zero-sum, which can cause them to be more opposed to gender-fair policies." Can someone explain why this isnt zero sum? If the hierarchy moves from being women at the bottom, men at the top to a fair mix, the 'gains' that women make are balanced out by 'losses' for the men. There isn't extra power/prestige/influence introduced to the system by being gender fair. To clarify, I'm pro equal opportunities, this isn't a sexist rant.
  • godelski 7y ago
    You can still have a hierarchy and the sum of the individuals within that hierarchy does not need to add to zero. It can definitely be positive. There's many joking examples about governments/lawyers/insert hated group making tasks more difficult or harder. This would be a negative value person and potentially a negative sum hierarchy. Conversely we can see groups of people working together and forming coalitions that have better payoffs than what the individual members could achieve on their own (like a union coming together and fighting for workers rights. Which can also lead to a more productive business that profits more, thus meaning the boss also profits). Tldr: Just because someone has a positive worth doesn't mean someone has a negative worth.
    • benj111 7y ago
      That's just the benefit of working as a group though. Bob, Bill, Jill and Joan are already working as a group when Bob and Bill are the bosses. If we make Bill and Jill the bosses we don't inherently gain anything from that. Yes Jill and Joan might work better because they feel appreciated, equally though Bill and Bob could work worse because they've lost something. Hell Joan could still be annoyed because she didn't get the bosses job.
      • godelski 7y ago
        A hierarchy is a group structure. You could even call this a coalition game. We can also say that everyone provides a positive value to the group. We can also say that certain people in certain positions provide more value to a coalition. None of this is zero sum. Someone being placed in a certain position does not require value being taken from elsewhere. This is not required in a hierarchical job structure. A zero sum game is one in which where one player gains value that results in another player losing value. Coalition-al games are games where members form groups.
• godelski 7y ago
  One of my favorites is the economy. People constantly talk about there only being a finite number of resources or money. While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations. It is easy to see when you take the historical perspective, that the vast majority of us are living much better off than those a hundred years ago and amazingly better than those of just a thousand years.
  • wpietri 7y ago
    Absolutely. This is also a huge problem in trade. Trump, for example sees trade in zero-sum terms, where if China and Europe are doing well, that's proof that America is losing.
  • jasim 7y ago
    Peak urban real-estate, regions with good weather, clean air and water, natural resources, biodiversity etc. might be counter points. Unless we achieve fundamental breakthroughs in natural and physical sciences as well as improve basic economic incentive structures that drive corporate behaviour, our current prosperity might be short-lived. It is difficult to confidently predict how any of these things will turn out though - our way of life has undergone massive change in the last five decades than it might have anytime before that, and that pace is only accelerating.
    • godelski 7y ago
      I mean more as a generalization. But as a counter point, we do have AC now. We are better at getting access to clean water. I wouldn't say things are short lived, since the trend has been going on for thousands of years. There's definitely been some bumps in the road (some pretty big ones), but usually they are local and short (in the grand scheme of things).
  • Retric 7y ago
    Money is a surprisingly poor way of measuring an economy. AC may be cheap as a percentage of GDP, but it can make a huge difference in quality of life. However, if you look at meat production as a share of GDP it significantly reduces the calculated economic growth over very long time periods.
• yyyk 7y ago
  It seems that the authors do not understand the 'zero-sum' definition and apply it to various situations where it simply does not apply. To pick for example the first article, the only one linking to the full article and not just an extract: Australians probably do not believe that there's a fixed sum of humans in the world and every new Iraqi means one less Australian. The demand to pick a nationality might be a bias (though plenty of states do not allow dual-citizenship), but it's not a 'zero sum' bias as commonly understood - nobody believes that there's an 'Australia-Iraq' game where only one side may win.
• pessimizer 7y ago
  I see this most clearly in people who will not trade in a board game like Monopoly unless the deal is extremely slanted in their favor. They simply can't understand that people who trade will always beat people who don't, and the easiest way to trade is to trade fairly. If four people are playing a game of Monopoly, and two trade with each other but the other two refuse, now two people are playing Monopoly and the other two are begging for it to end. (Please don't reply by criticizing Monopoly, I know that many people don't like it, I suspect this is a major reason why.)
  • 11thEarlOfMar 7y ago
    It's one of my all-time favorites. My favorite 'house rule' was invented by my nephew: He negotiated a % of rent I collected utilizing properties he traded to me.
    • pessimizer 7y ago
      Funny corollaries because Monopoly is a zero-sum game (at the end there will be a ordering of players by relative wealth, and their absolute wealth ceases to matter): players should be trying to 1) trade as much as possible, even if some trades are slightly slanted against them, 2) spread their trades evenly amongst the other players, and 3) to actively discourage trades between other players. You might as well give both players who trade a trade point, and award the victory to the player who has the most at the end.
      • Iv 7y ago
        Yes, Monopoly more or less is (there are ways to gain and lose money without taking the other players' money, but they almost do not depend on players' choices). I think the parent's point is that trade in monopoly, however, is not. By making an exchange that allows both traders to complete a color set, they end up both much richer than before the trade.
        • pessimizer 7y ago
          I understand the parent's point because I am the parent.
• anovikov 7y ago
  I would say it's a natural thing: our biases are mainly a creation of our subconscious, multigenerational experience starting from prehistoric times, our instincts. And before industrial era and before long-range maritime trade started, world has been pretty much a zero-sum place, so perceiving everything as zero-sum is "natural" to us. Come to think about it, there must be a class of businesses based on this bias, it must be one of the hardest for people to overcome (just as it is hard to overcome lure of sexualized ads: that too, is an instinct, requiring too much conscious power to reject, especially when seeing it casually).
• username90 7y ago
  Men making games for men doesn't prevent women from making games for women, but somehow people always assume that the incumbents must adapt to serve the entire market. Why don't people see this as a great opportunity for women to carve out their own place in the industry? Literature already works like this, we have erotic romance novels with explicit descriptions of men's bodies catering to women and we have action novels with explicit description of women's bodies catering to men.
  • eropple 7y ago
    Men absolutely losing their minds and filling women game designers' inboxes with death threats because they wanted to make games that didn't cater exclusively to men is a thing that already happened.
  • watwut 7y ago
    Gamers go apeshit over games for other men that they don't like. Or doritos. Gaming is absolutely worst example for this, because the community tend to be volatile over stupidest nonsense.
    • username90 7y ago
      The game industry is not zero sum, but a game series is. If a company made a new IP based around nerf guns and cell shaded graphics then nobody would complain. However if the next call of duty changed all weapons to nerf guns and used cell shaded graphics people would go ape-shit on it because it killed their beloved series. If the switch to nerf guns came as a result from gun-ban activists then people would send death threats to said gun-ban activists for killing their beloved series. This behavior is stupid and insane, yes, but it isn't as random or unreasonable as many think it is.
• macawfish 7y ago
  This article just kicked me off into a one hour tangent thinking about voting reform activism and my frustration with staunch ordinal voting advocates. I've found that a lot of ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel that in order for a voting system to work well, it must impose a total order on peoples' preferences. Although they might say that people's preferences are naturally totally ordered, and that it wouldn't be an imposition at all. For me, ordinal systems are destroying information about equal openness to multiple choices. They are filtering the nuances of my preferences through a strict and destructive hierarchy. All just to distill these hypothetical "favorites" that I don't actually have, but which ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel are real anyway. But I just don't believe that. It's like a whole different worldview. I believe that this sort of bias is at play in that broken, age old gap between ordinal and cardinal voting system advocates. I wish some funny people would get together and do skits exposing the quirks of different voting systems by playing them out in an everyday, relatable situations e.g. a group of people choosing what restaurant to go to. I can just imagine a Rob Richie character enforcing that everyone must have a strictly ranked preference between pizza and Thai food. No you are not allowed to be open to both. You must declare which is your ultimate favorite of the two. Even if it means alienating our lactose intolerant friend. They'll be fine since there's salad at the pizza place.
• TheOperator 7y ago
  Every single example of zero sum thinking the author used was of whites and men trying to protect their own interests though zero-sum thinking which I found interesting. The author also seems to ignore that altruistic policies which could garner majority groups indirect benefits are themselves based on zero-sum thinking. When I hear people justify affirmative action policies and racial and gender quotas some of the most frequent stats I heard bring up is relative income levels, relative employment levels, relative everything. Essentially the argument is based around the idea that "majorities' succeeding must have come at the expense of other groups. Even in say... a field like computing in America which is an economic juggernaut that popped up from nowhere which funnels money into the country... the very fact that more White/Asian/Indian men have gotten more jobs than other groups is framed as a crime against those other groups when this is not obvious. Specific needless discrimination and bias is brought up to bring home an argument that majority groups have been playing a nepotistic zero-sum game to their benefit and others and the greater good of societies detriment by keeping talented people with diverse perspectives down. Which isn't an obviously wrong argument yet the solutions on how to fight against this issue like affirmative action are fundamentally couched in zero-sum thinking. People who oppose it do not have zero-sum bias although they are arguably bias towards selfishness. Those are not the same thing. I don't believe the author made his argument very well. He's confusing zero-sum bias with other types of bias. Singling out white men in all his examples also makes him come off as acting as if it's one group which has the problem which is unlikely to persuade anybody that it's personally wrong for them to engage in zero-sum bias. P.S. Is zero-sum thinking truly irrational with the future repercussions of population growth and global warming? Time will tell.