The Zero-Sum Bias: When People Think that Everything Is a Competition
6th July 2019
The zero-sum bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to mistakenly view certain situations as being zero-sum, meaning that they incorrectly believe that one party’s gains are directly balanced by other parties’ losses. For example, the zero-sum bias can cause people to think that there is competition for a resource that they feel is limited, in situations where the resource in question is actually unlimited and freely available.
This is behind all of the hair-on-fire bloviation about ‘wealth inequality’. The unconscious substrate of this worry is the conviction that if person X has more, then person Y (or many persons Y) therefore have less.
if you give person X $10 and person Y $2, there are dimwits who will argue that person Y is somehow worse off, even when it is objectively obvious that person Y is actually better off.
Many of these dimwits work for the news media.