My grandfather’s idea of an Easter egg hunt involved hiding money in colorful plastic eggs sprinkled around his house in Long Island. Most held coins, but there was always one with a crisp, new $100 bill.
My cousin, Billy-O, and I were the only players. We were usually playful partners in mayhem but as competitors, we took on every hunt with gusto, flipping over cushions, throwing open cabinets, knocking each other aside until, without fail, Billy-O found the $100.
The first time he won, I fought back tears. But after a few years of losses, I exploded.
“It’s just not fair,” I yelled.
“Life’s unfair,” my grandfather told us. “You win or you lose.”
This is what’s called zero-sum thinking — the belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another. And these days, that notion seems to be everywhere. It’s how we view college admissions, as a cutthroat contest for groups defined by race or privilege. It’s there in our love for “Squid Game.” It’s Silicon Valley’s winner-take-all ethos, and it’s at the core of many popular opinions: that immigrants steal jobs from Americans; that the wealthy get rich at others’ expense; that men lose power and status when women gain.
But nowhere is the rise of our zero-sum era more pronounced than on the world stage, where President Trump has been demolishing decades of collaborative foreign policy with threats of protectionist tariffs and demands for Greenland, Gaza, the Panama Canal and mineral rights in Ukraine. Since taking office, he has often channeled the age he most admires — the imperial 19th century.
And in his own past, zero-sum thinking was deeply ingrained. His biographers tell us he learned from his father that you were either a winner or loser in life, and that there was nothing worse than being a sucker. In Trumpworld, it’s kill or be killed; he who is not a hammer must be an anvil.
Mr. Trump may not be alone in this. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China have also displayed a zero-sum view of a world in which bigger powers get to do what they want while weaker ones suffer. All three leaders, no matter what they say, often behave as if power and prosperity were in short supply, leading inexorably to competition and confrontation..
Until recently, the international order largely was built on a different idea — that interdependence and rules boost opportunities for all. It was aspirational, producing fourfold economic growth since the 1980s, and even nuclear disarmament treaties from superpowers. It was also filled with gassy promises — from places like Davos or the G20 — that rarely improved day-to-day lives.
“The reversion to zero-sum thinking now is in some ways a backlash against the positive-sum thinking of the post-Cold War era — the idea that globalization could lift all boats, that the U.S. could draft an international order in which nearly everyone could participate and become a responsible stakeholder,” said Hal Brands, a global affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The original Trump insight from 2016-17 was that this wasn’t happening.”
What we are now experiencing, especially in the United States, is effectively a rejection of the belief in abundance and cooperation. It is an uprising against the premise that many groups can gain at once — a cynical, contagious us-or-them attitude, spreading across countries, communities and families.
With kids’ games, maybe zero-summing feels like tough love. But on a national and global scale, it’s increasingly hard not to ask: What are we losing with a win-or-lose approach?
‘An Image of Limited Good’
Zero-sum thinking made a lot of sense for our evolutionary ancestors, who were forced to compete for food to survive. But the mind-set has lingered and researchers have become more interested in mapping its impact.
The most recent work in the social sciences builds on the findings of George M. Foster, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley. He did his field work in Mexico’s rural communities where he was the first researcher to show that some societies hold “an image of limited good.”
In 1965, he wrote that the people he studied in the hills of Michoacán view their entire universe “as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply.”
Psychologists later confirmed that a sense of scarcity and feeling threatened are fundamental components of zero-sum thinking in individuals and cultures. A 2018 analysis of 43 nations, for example, found that zero-sum beliefs tend to emerge more “in hierarchical societies with an economic disparity of scarce resources.”
But zero-sum thinking is a perception, not an objective assessment. Sometimes people will see zero-sum games all around them, even though for most of us, “purely zero-sum situations are exceedingly rare,” as a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology recently noted.
Think about two co-workers vying for the same promotion: Yes, one might get it and the other not, but over the long term, their fortunes will also rise or fall together based on how their team or company performs. Even in sports — the prototypical zero-sum contest — losing to a stronger competitor can accelerate the development of important skills — as I keep telling my son when his soccer team struggles to score in a tough, local league.
Essentially, many people slip into what Daniel V. Meegan, a psychologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, has identified as a “a zero-sum bias.” They believe they are in scenarios of cutthroat competition even when they are not.
Many zero-summers like to picture themselves as tough, hardheaded realists — and sometimes a winner-take-all approach can lead to gains or victory, at least temporarily. But the science says zero-sum thinking is rooted in fear. It mistakes Foster’s “image of limited good” for wisdom and treats potential partners as threats, creating blind spots to the potential for mutual benefit.
That’s why zero-sum thinking can be so problematic: It pinches perspective,sharpens antagonism and distracts our minds from what we can do with cooperation and creativity. People with a zero-sum mentality can easily miss a win-win.
But the far greater danger for zero-sum thinking is the lose-lose.
With Us or Against Us
The last time zero-sum thinking guided the world, Europe’s colonial powers of the 16th to 19th centuries saw wealth as finite, measured in gold, silver and land. Gains for one translated to losses for another and empires levied high tariffs to protect themselves from competitors.
Mr. Trump has romanticized the era’s tail end. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” he told reporters last month. “That’s when we were a tariff country.”
In fact, the United States is far richer now in household income and economic output. But of greater concern may be Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the historical context. Economists say the mercantilism and great-power rivalries of that imperial age hindered wealth creation, advanced inequality and often led to the most complete zero-sum game of all: war.
The 80 Years War. The 30 Years War. The Nine Years War. Trade monopolies and empire building produced decades of lose-losing that cost huge sums and caused millions of casualties.
What actually made the United States distinct, according to historians, was a greater adherence to the exuberant capitalism laid out by Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.”
Published in 1776, the book pivoted away from the scarcity assumptions of mercantilism. Smith showed that wealth could be more than metal. It could be everything an economy does, otherwise known as gross domestic product. New riches could be created through productivity, innovation and free markets that let each country prioritize what it does best.
Nonzero-sum capitalism was pretty compelling for a young nation of striving immigrants. (The foreign-born share of the U.S. population peaked at nearly 15 percent around 1890, a fact Mr. Trump also seems to ignore.) And in a lot of ways, free markets and sharing were harder for Europe’s leaders to embrace. World War I and II were both spurred on by zero-sum approaches to international relations.
That line I included high up in this article — “he who is not a hammer must be an anvil”? It comes from a speech that Adolf Hitler gave about the Treaty of Versailles, which forced Germany to pay reparations, disarm and lose territory after World War I.
“If it’s the 1930s, you correctly understand that if countries are not firmly in your bloc, they might be completely mobilized against you,” said Daniel Immerwahr, a historian of U.S. foreign policy at Northwestern University. Only after the war ended, he added, was there an attempt to “change the rules of the game” — to make the world less zero-sum, by assuring countries that they could get rich through trade rather than by seizing land or starting wars.
The United States built and oversaw that system, mainly through organizations like the International Monetary Fund. Which is not to say that Washington’s outlook was never zero sum, or that the United States never got stuck in a lose-lose of its own.
I covered the Iraq war, after President George W. Bush told other countries they had a zero-sum choice: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
A few months ago, I opened a new bureau for The New York Times in Vietnam. I now live with my family in a country still dealing with the fallout of a zero-sum civil war that the United States joined because of its own zero-sum belief that any country the Communists won amounted to a major loss for America’s way of life.
The consequences were severe: a toll of three million Vietnamese lives and more than 58,000 American soldiers, plus a legacy of psychological trauma.
Maybe the world can avoid repeating such a catastrophic spiral. The global economy is more interconnected now, a potent disincentive to aggression. Many countries that have also benefited from the postwar system — especially in Europe and Asia — are seeking to protect its principle of peace through cooperative deterrence.
Maybe zero-sum thinking can even encourage restraint. In the same paper declaring that purely zero-sum situations are “exceedingly rare,” two psychology professors, Patricia Andrews Fearon, and Friedrich M. Gotz, found that “the zero sum mind-set predicts both hyper-competitiveness and anxious avoidance of competitions.”
Some zero-summers may not compete, they concluded, because they do not want to cause the pain or face the costs that they think are necessary for success. They also may avoid contests that they do not think they can win.
Mr. Trump may end up fighting and fleeing, depending on the circumstances. He views other nations in only two ways, Mr. Immerwahr said: “Either they are completely in your thrall or they are threats.”
Simplistic, yes, but many Americans also see foreign affairs in blunt, personal terms. After I wrote recently about the painful impact of U.S.A.I.D.’s demise on Vietnam’s Agent Orange victims, one reader emailed a short, telling critique: “Get real. That’s MY money.”
Change the Game
What causes this kind of zero-sum thinking?
Economic inequality fosters such a belief about success. But zero-sum Americans may not really be squabbling over taxes, college, jobs or wealth.
Jer Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who oversees extensive surveys of primal world beliefs, told me the current backlash may be rooted in a zero-sum conviction about something deeper: importance.
Many Americans seem to fear that if some other group matters more, they matter less. “In 21st-century America, the more common, driving fear is not food or resource scarcity, but not enough meaning,” Dr. Clifton said. “We are a people desperate to matter.”
Under the old order, Americans found meaning in a belief that the United States was special. Our nation was built not on blood or soil but ideas — democracy, freedom, a chance to rise from rags to riches — and we were confident we could inspire and improve other countries.
Today, fewer Americans than ever want the United States to play a major or leading role in international affairs, according to Gallup surveys reaching back to the ’60s. They’re dissatisfied with themselves and the world, and they are wobbly on how to move forward.
Any desired revival of meaning may not come easily. Zero-sum culture breeds hostility and distrust by insisting on domination. You can hear a common response in Friedrich Merz, who is likely to be Germany’s new leader, calling for “independence” from the United States.
“One thing I’ve seen people do if they know they’re being forced into a zero-sum game is minimize investment and hold back resources,” said Michael Smithson, an emeritus professor of psychology at the Australian National University who has studied zero-sum thinking for more than a decade.
Essentially, those who resist the game shun the zero-sum player, who tends to be less happy and hard to be around. Fewer players (and resources) make the game less lucrative — but safer. With time, the “win-winners” add partners and agree to new rules. In the vein of Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” studies have found that people can be taught to see situations as nonzero sum with deliberation and guidance.
Mr. Smithson said he often told students in his classes to see him as their opponent so they would collaborate with one another, not compete.
My grandfather’s Easter egg hunt could have used a similar tilt. With a time limit, Billy-O and I would have had an incentive to cooperate, to make sure we found the $100 egg before the deadline. Instead of win or lose, it could have been “share the work, and the winnings.”
