Patricia Andrews Fearon's new paper explores how a zero-sum mindset explains why people fail to cooperate, even if it kills them
Believing that life is a zero-sum game may help create the very scarcity and hostility that the zero-sum mindset expects from the world. To create a different reality, perhaps we must first choose to play a different game.
Patricia Andrews Fearon
It’s an age-old question: Why don’t people cooperate even when it is in their best interest to do so? It’s also an urgent question as we face huge global challenges mired in conflict and polarisation.
A new paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology offers fresh psychological insights into this question through the lens of “lay game theory”- and specifically, the zero-sum mindset – and helps explain why people fail to cooperate, even if it kills them.
Based on evidence from more than 10,000 unique participants in six countries (Belgium, India, Italy, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the United States) on three continents and leveraging longitudinal, experimental and field studies, the paper, entitled “The Zero-Sum Mindset”, is led by Gates Cambridge Scholar Dr Patricia Andrews Fearon [2017] and draws on her PhD in Psychology at the University of Cambridge.
Seeing a situation as a zero-sum game, where the underlying presumption is that others are structurally motivated to harm you, stifles cooperation – even when such cooperation could greatly benefit both parties. The paper proposes that zero-sum thinking can also be understood as a broader mindset – a generalised belief about how the world works. As a mindset, it argues that the damaging effects of zero-sum thinking span across a wide range of domains and situations – touching economics, politics, public health and other interpersonal relationships.
The paper shows the zero-sum mindset is distinct from existing concepts and is stable over time, predicting disparate instances of zero-sum thinking and its strategic implications across domains and cultures. It also demonstrates that it promotes hostile interpretations of others, even in objectively non-zero-sum situations. And it predicts lower cooperation, even in situations where cooperation is a matter of life or death, as well as both hyper-competitiveness and anxious avoidance of competition for those who feel either unable or unwilling to engage in the hostility they perceive as necessary for success or who anticipate such aggression from others.
The researchers cite concrete examples of the harm zero-sum mindsets can do, such as attitudes to the Covid pandemic. They show that, in the United States, people’s zero-sum mindsets, measured the year before the pandemic, predicted their attitudes and cooperation with public health efforts in the midst of the crisis. The same patterns were seen in Belgium. They note that a zero-sum mindset was a better predictor of compliance with COVID-19 prevention efforts than age, which was understood from the outset of the pandemic to be the single greatest risk factor for hospitalisation and death from COVID-19.
Andrews Fearon, currently a research fellow at Stanford’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab and The Agency Fund, and a former journalist and certified conflict mediator, says the zero-sum mindset may be self-fulfilling and that understanding it may help us navigate out of the vicious cycles of volatility.
She states: “Believing that life is a zero-sum game may help create the very scarcity and hostility that the zero-sum mindset expects from the world. To create a different reality, perhaps we must first choose to play a different game. When we fixate too narrowly on the zero-sum elements of life, we can become dominated by a constant sense of threat that makes it even harder to notice the many ways in which our most important goals (such as our desires for health, safety, meaning and belonging) are actually shared – perhaps even interdependently so. I suspect that if we could see this more clearly we might unlock our incredible collective potential to flourish.”
*Picture credit: Wikipedia.
