%% [[Deciding]] tags:: #note/idea | #on/bias | #on/negotiation | #on/ego people:: # Zero-sum thinking Lon Setnik dates:: 2022-10-09 %% *The pie is fixed if I can't imagine how to grow it.* This reminds me of how [[people value safety and self-esteem]], but we view those things differently, so we consider it from our view but we don't [[first seek to understand]]. [[Bounded Rationality]] limits our thinking, so we are tied by [[cognitive biases]] to narrow outcomes. It's kind of like [[positivism]] thinking, that the measures are the truth, but that only creates a narrow view of the truth. It's also kind of like [[Blue Ocean Strategy]], where you can create a new place to grow away from the red ocean of competition. [[don't chase the soccer ball]] so you don't end up the same narrow place as everyone else. > **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: > > A general belief system about the antagonistic nature of social relations, shared by people in a society or culture and based on the implicit assumption that a finite amount of goods exists in the world, in which one person's winning makes others the losers, and vice versa ... a relatively permanent and general conviction that social relations are like a zero-sum game. People who share this conviction believe that success, especially economic success, is possible only at the expense of other people's failures. > > 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. > > [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum%20thinking) This matters because other ideas like [[second order effects]], [[the hidden power of compounding]], can cause us to take risks and if we can [[climb till you fall]], you never know what you can achieve if you are experiencing [[psychological safety]] you can do experiments and end up places you never considered possible. ### What would the opposite argument be? [[Forage carefully]] because you can't always tell what is zero-sum and what isn't, or at least what people you are in negotiations with so they may not be looking to [[Negotiate to Optimize not Compromise]]. ## Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking