Zero-Sum Thinking

Zero-sum thinking perceives a situation as a zero-sum game, in which one person's gain is necessarily another person's loss, a pattern captured in the saying your gain is my loss. Unlike the formal game-theory concept it borrows its name from, zero-sum thinking refers specifically to a psychological construct, a person's own subjective interpretation of a situation rather than its actual mathematical structure; researchers Rozycka-Tran and colleagues define it as a general belief system about the antagonistic nature of social relations, built on the implicit assumption that only a finite amount of goods exists in the world, so that one person's winning necessarily makes others lose. Zero-sum bias is the specific cognitive bias toward this kind of thinking, the tendency to intuitively judge a situation as zero-sum even when it is not, producing zero-sum fallacies, false beliefs that a situation is zero-sum, that can in turn drive other poor judgments and decisions; in economics this pattern is often called the fixed-pie fallacy.