Zero-sum thinking

Zero-sum thinking perceives situations as zero-sum games, where one person's gain would be another's loss. The term is derived from game theory. However, unlike the game theory concept, zero-sum thinking refers to a psychological construct—a person's subjective interpretation of a situation. Zero-sum thinking is captured by the saying "your gain is my loss" (or conversely, "your loss is my gain"). Rozycka-Tran et al. (2015) defined zero-sum thinking as:
Zero-sum bias is a cognitive bias towards zero-sum thinking; it is people's tendency to intuitively judge that a situation is zero-sum, even when this is not the case. This bias promotes zero-sum fallacies, false beliefs that situations are zero-sum. Such fallacies can cause other false judgements and poor decisions. In economics, "zero-sum fallacy" generally refers to the fixed-pie fallacy.
There are many examples of zero-sum thinking, some of them fallacious.
There is no evidence which suggests that zero-sum thinking is an enduring feature of human psychology. Game-theoretic situations rarely apply to instances of individual behaviour. This is demonstrated by the ordinary response to the prisoner's dilemma.
Zero-sum thinking is the result of both proximate and ultimate causes.
In terms of ultimate causation, zero-sum thinking might be a legacy of human evolution. Specifically, it might be understood to be a psychological adaptation that facilitated successful resource competition in the environment of ancestral humans where resources like mates, status, and food were perpetually scarce. For example, Rubin suggests that the pace of technological growth was so slow during the period in which modern humans evolved that no individual would have observed any growth during their lifetime: "Each person would live and die in a world of constant technology and income. Thus, there was no incentive to evolve a mechanism for understanding or planning for growth" (p. 162). Rubin also points to instances where the understanding of laypeople and economists about economic situations diverge, such as the lump-of-labor fallacy. From this perspective, zero-sum thinking might be understood as the default way that humans think about resource allocations, which must be unlearned by, for example, an education in basic economics.
Zero-sum thinking can also be understood in terms of proximate causation, which refers to the developmental history of individuals within their own lifetime. The proximate causes of zero-sum thinking include the experiences that individuals have with resource allocations, as well as their beliefs about specific situations, or their beliefs about the world in general.
One of the proximate causes of zero-sum thinking is the experiences that individuals have with scarce resources or zero-sum interactions in their developmental environment. In 1965, George M. Foster argued that members of "peasant" societies have an "Image of Limited Good," which he argued was learned through by experiences in a society that was essentially zero-sum.
More recently, Rozycka-Tran et al. (2015) conducted a cross-cultural study that compared the responses of individuals in 37 nations to a scale of zero-sum beliefs. This scale asked individuals to report their agreement with statements that measured zero-sum thinking. For example, one item on the scale stated that "Successes of some people are usually failures of others". Rozycka-Tran et al. found that individuals in countries with lower Gross Domestic Product showed stronger zero-sum beliefs on average, suggesting that "the belief in zero-sum game seems to arise in countries with lower income, where resources are scarce" (p. 539). Similarly, Rozycka-Tran et al. found that individuals with lower socioeconomic status displayed stronger zero-sum beliefs.
Related to experiences with resource-scarce environments is the belief that a resource is scarce or finite. For example, the lump of labour fallacy refers to the belief that in the economy there is a fixed amount of work to be done, and thus the allocation of jobs is zero-sum. Although the belief that a resource is scarce might develop through experiences with resource scarcity, this is not necessarily the case. For example, individuals might come to believe that wealth is finite because it is a claim that has been repeated by politicians or journalists.
Another proximate cause of zero-sum thinking is the belief that one (or one's group) is entitled to a certain share of a resource. An extreme case is the belief that one is entitled to all of a resource that exists, implying that any gains by another is one's own loss. Less extreme is the belief that one (or one's group) is superior and therefore entitled to more than others. For example, perceptions of zero-sum group competition have been associated with the Dominance sub-scale of the social dominance orientation personality trait, which itself has been characterized as a zero-sum worldview ("a view of human existence as zero-sum," p. 999). Individuals who practice monogamy have also been found to think about love in consensually nonmonogamous relationships as zero-sum, and it was suggested that this might be because they believe that individuals in romantic relationships have an entitlement to their partner's love.
When individuals think that a situation is zero-sum, they will be more likely to act competitively (or less cooperatively) towards others, because they will see others as a competitive threat. For example, when students think that they are being graded on a curve—a grading scheme that makes the allocation of grades zero-sum—they will be less likely to provide assistance to a peer who is proximate in status to themselves, because that peer's gain could be their own loss.
When individuals perceive that there is a zero-sum competition in society for resources like jobs, they will be less likely to hold pro-immigration attitudes (because immigrants would deplete the resource). Zero-sum thinking may also lead to certain social prejudices. When individuals hold zero-sum beliefs about love in romantic relationships, they are more prejudiced against consensual nonmonogamists (presumably because the perception of zero-sumness makes consensual nonmonogamy seem inadequate or unfair).