Majority members misperceive even “win-win” diversity policies as unbeneficial to them.

Brown, Nik; Jacoby-Senghor, Drew S.

doi:10.1037/pspi0000372

Cited by 27 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 111 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Yet, even though political lobbying sometimes favors policies that benefit special-interest groups at the expense of the ‘silent majority,’ many policies offer “near-Pareto improvements” which greatly benefit one party without significantly harming others (Stiglitz, 1998). Nevertheless, viewing success as zero-sum may lead people to (wrongly) view policies as coming at their expense, even when that is not the case (Baron et al, 2006; Brown & Jacoby-Senghor, 2021). Similarly, people may view the success of businesses and corporations as coming at the expense of the social good, and thus causing more harm than good (Bhattacharjee et al, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal relative deprivation and the belief that economic success is zero-sum.

Ongis¹,

Davidai²

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why do people view economic success as zero-sum? In seven studies (including a large, nationally representative sample of more than 90,000 respondents from 60 countries), we explore how personal relative deprivation influences zero-sum thinking-the belief that one person's gains can only be obtained at other people's expense. We find that personal relative deprivation fosters a belief that economic success is zero-sum, and that this is true regardless of participants' household income, political ideology, or subjective social class. Moreover, in a large and preregistered study, we find that the effect of personal relative deprivation on zero-sum thinking is mediated by lay perceptions of society. The more people see themselves as having been unfairly disadvantaged relative to others, the more they view the world as unjust and economic success as determined by external forces beyond one's control. In turn, these cynical views of society lead people to believe that economic success is zero-sum. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on social comparisons, the distribution of resources, and the psychological consequences of feeling personally deprived.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal relative deprivation and the belief that economic success is zero-sum.

Ongis¹,

Davidai²

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…While some research indicates that everyone is susceptible to perceiving the world through a zero-sum lens ( 25 , 38 ), it is possible that disadvantaged group members are motivated to construe equality-enhancing policies as non–zero-sum. Recent work shows that, whereas white Americans believe that they are hurt by university diversity policies that mutually benefit white and non-white applicants, Black Americans accurately see these polices as helping everyone ( 12 ). This divergence may have something to do with the fact that people frequently believe that others gain at one’s own expense but that one’s own gains do not come at the expense of others ( 24 , 70 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Decades of research make it clear that people closely attend to how well-off they are compared to others and behave in ways that maximize their relative advantages (8,9). As a result, people often perceive situations to be zero-sum, even in situations that are not (10)(11)(12). For instance, the "fixed pie bias" leads negotiators to see their interests as unavoidably opposed to those of their counterpart, even when there exist opportunities to improve the well-being of one or both parties without harming either (13)(14)(15).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Nine preregistered studies ( n = 4197) demonstrate that advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful. Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited. A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs. Finally two novel-groups experiments experiments reveal that advantaged participants’ harm misperceptions predict voting for inequality-enhancing policies that financially hurt them and against equality-enhancing policies that financially benefit them. Misperceptions persist even after an intervention to improve decision-making. This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

show abstract

“…Instead, viewing U.S.–China relations as zero-sum suggests a belief that the two countries’ economic outlooks are negatively correlated, such that more wealth generated in China means less wealth generated in the U.S. And, since people think of gains and losses relative to reference points (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), zero-sum beliefs likely reflect perceived changes in well-being—whether one party experienced positive change while another party experienced negative change—rather than a calculation of cumulative gains and losses. If so, this could explain why majority group members often view positive changes for historically underserved minorities as zero-sum, even when the minority group remains objectively worse-off (Brown & Jacoby-Senghor, 2021; Norton & Sommers, 2011). Thus, future research could examine how zero-sum beliefs relate to the perceived effect different parties have on each other (whether their outcomes are seen as inversely related) versus the distribution of resources itself.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychology of asymmetric zero-sum beliefs.

Roberts¹,

Davidai²

2022

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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-and 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.

show abstract

Majority members misperceive even “win-win” diversity policies as unbeneficial to them.

Abstract: for their invaluable support with this research.

Cited by 27 publications

References 111 publications

Personal relative deprivation and the belief that economic success is zero-sum.

Personal relative deprivation and the belief that economic success is zero-sum.

If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

The psychology of asymmetric zero-sum beliefs.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About