“The Psychology of Asymmetric Zero-Sum Beliefs”, 2021 (; backlinks; similar):
[see also “Win-win denial: The psychological underpinnings of zero-sum thinking”, et al 2021] Zero-sum beliefs reflect the perception that one party’s gains are necessarily offset by another party’s losses.
Although zero-sum relationships are, from a strictly theoretical perspective, symmetrical, we find evidence for asymmetrical zero-sum beliefs: The belief that others gain at one’s own expense, but not vice versa. Across various contexts (international relations, interpersonal negotiations, political partisanship, organizational hierarchies) and research designs (within/between-participant), we find that people are more prone to believe that others’ success comes at their own expense than they are to believe that their own success comes at others’ expense. Moreover, we find that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs only when thinking about how their own party relates to other parties but not when thinking about how other parties relate to each other. Finally, we find that this effect is moderated by how threatened people feel by others’ success and that reassuring people about their party’s strengths eliminates asymmetric zero-sum beliefs.
We discuss the theoretical contributions of our findings to research on interpersonal and intergroup zero-sum beliefs and their implications for understanding when and why people view life as zero-sum.
[Keywords: zero-sum beliefs, intergroup relations, interpersonal relations, conflict, perceived threat]
…In 7 studies (including 2 preregistered experiments), we examine the psychology of asymmetric zero-sum beliefs. Studies 1 and 2 examine whether people believe that other countries (Study 1) and people (Study 2) gain at their expense, but not vice versa. Study 3 examines whether asymmetric zero-sum beliefs are unique to contexts that directly involve one’s own party, but not to contexts that involve other parties’ relations to one another. We show that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs when considering how their own country’s outcomes relate to another country’s outcomes (ie. U.S.-China relations), but not when thinking about 2 separate countries (ie. Germany-China relations). Study 4 replicates and extends this effect in the domain of political parties and examines the role of threat in asymmetric zero-sum beliefs. We examine whether the degree to which political partisans feel threatened by an opposing party predicts how much they see that party as gaining at their own party’s expense. Finally, Studies 5, 6A, and 6B examine the causal role of threat on asymmetric zero-sum beliefs in both interpersonal and intergroup contexts by manipulating how threatened people feel by an opposing party. We find that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs when feeling threatened by others’ success, but not when feeling reassured about their own success.