"Win-win" is the usual dynamic of voluntary exchanges in modern free market economies. Both parties win—that is, each participant gets a thing or service they want more than the thing they had before the transaction. That's a win-win. And yet, zero-sum thinking—you win, I lose—remains pervasive.
In their recent article, "If you rise, I fall," in Science Advances, a team of three psychologists associated with the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University probe a particularly perplexing aspect of zero-sum thinking. They find in nine different studies that members of "advantaged groups" tend to interpret equality-enhancing measures as "necessarily harming their access to resources."
