
The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition - EndXA
https://effectiviology.com/zero-sum-bias/
======
pessimizer
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
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
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
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
I understand the parent's point because I am the parent.

------
godelski
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.

~~~
nerdponx
_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._

This is a frustrating hand-wave that I've been subjected to for far too long.
It's absolutely possible that there is a finite amount of wealth.

Moreover, even in an economy with positive growth, if a small fraction of
individuals capture a large enough amount of the growth, wealth has
effectively been capped for everyone else.

~~~
e3b0c
If by the wealth you mean land, then yes it's finite. But the ownership of
man-crafted things is not. You can always create new apps or websites that
generate values. Those man-crafted things can become useless someday as well.
For example, a 3.5" floppy disk drive probably isn't worth what it used to be
anymore.

------
zwkrt
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
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...

~~~
0815test
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-
soundi...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/style-guide-not-sounding-
like-an-evil-robot/)

~~~
perfmode
this feels like a superfluous nit

~~~
wayoutthere
Thank you human :)

------
petra
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.

~~~
TTPrograms
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
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 ?

~~~
closeparen
The most effective person gets hired into a role. The firm performs well,
moves more product, lowers prices for customers, sends larger orders to its
suppliers, invests some surplus in R&D, grows its payroll, generates return
for shareholders who then invest their gains in other enterprises, etc. Or an
ineffective person is hired and the opposite happens.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy)

------
gnicholas
> _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
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?

~~~
gnicholas
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
The other alternative is that the inferior and more expensive version simply
stops being produced.

------
umvi
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)

~~~
gamegoblin
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
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.

~~~
ABCLAW
>Well labour prices (for whatever the industry is) is driven by market forces.
[...] If the market rate is artificially inflated [...]

First, are all markets just markets?

Second, what if the market rate is artificially depressed - what if it is
systemically artificially depressed?

Do market expectations align with an appropriate distribution of wealth to
labour under conditions where the first is false or the second is true?

~~~
davesmith1983
> First, are all markets just markets?

I am not sure what you mean by this.

> Second, what if the market rate is artificially depressed - what if it is
> systemically artificially depressed?

Regarding artificial depression. Well this is where we get into some somewhat
controversial territory.

Some will argue that immigration artificially depresses wages as you can
artificially increase the supply of labour and thus drive down the prices.
Those that are conspiratorially minded would claim that large companies would
make efforts to lobby Political parties to have a more open doors policy on
immigration.

Now there is some evidence of the market rate being depressed due to
immigration e.g. construction wages have increased in the UK after the "Leave
Vote".

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/24/constructio...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/24/construction-
pay-rises-as-eu-workers-weigh-up-leaving-uk-survey-brexit)

But I remember reading about a Bank of England report which is somewhat recent
and this is the published paper:

[https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/the-
impac...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/the-impact-of-
immigration-on-occupational-wages-evidence-from-britain)

However the stats themselves go over my head. I have google'd around for a
simplified explanation (because I don't trust any of the newspapers to be
honest as they will each push their own agenda). It appears that the effect on
a native workers on minimum wage would have only lost less than a penny per
hour due to immigration. A penny per hour is a rounding error for most people.

However that seems to be at Odds at what we have seen recently with
construction.

So I don't know what to think tbh and I won't claim to be any definitive
authority on the matter.

> Do market expectations align with an appropriate distribution of wealth to
> labour under conditions where the first is false or the second is true?

Sorry it isn't clear what you are asking me to compare.

------
benj111
"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
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
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
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.

~~~
benj111
"A zero sum game is one in which where one player gains value that results in
another player losing value"

Yes that's what I'm contending. There can only be one boss, one deputy boss,
one assistant deputy boss.

Your point about putting the right person in the right role is a fair point,
but its from an organisational POV, not from an individual POV. If I'm the
deputy manager, and I get demoted because Tina is a better fit, I have lost,
and Tina has gained by the same amount. For Tina and I, it is a zero sum game.
I am not misinterpreting that situation as a zero sum game, because for me it
_is_ a zero sum game.

~~~
godelski
I understand then. We're talking about two different games. (I believe) You're
talking about the game of obtaining positions. Yes, those games are "mostly"
zero sum.

I am talking about a game which describes how well off everyone in the
structure is. This is part of why I say "mostly" above, because if the
structure is functioning efficiently it can expand and new allocations can be
made, but I'd agree that in that instance it is again a zero sum for obtaining
those positions (but now with more allocations than the previous game).

------
username90
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.

~~~
watwut
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
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.

------
TheOperator
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.

------
macawfish
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.

------
xondono
The textbook example of zero-sum thinking is how most people (specially those
involved in politics) talk about imports and exports.

~~~
BurningFrog
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
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
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.

------
anovikov
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).

------
atian
People are also dumb.

------
GrapeFriedNiggr
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).

------
verroq
A common one on HN is cryptocurrency energy use. If crypto didn't exist that
energy would have been "wasted" on something else.

~~~
dboreham
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.

------
yyyk
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.

