Can Sports’ Win-Lose Mentality Make Us All Worse Off?

Rooting for your team creates a sense of belonging, strengthening group identity and social bonding. But the win-lose dynamic of sports may also lead to a less desirable effect: It can foster a zero-sum view of the world, one that frames social interactions as a competition for scarce resources, where a winner’s gain comes at the expense of a loser. 

“The problem is that economies and organizations thrive when people creatively find solutions that make everyone better,” said Aaron C. Kay, the J. Rex Fuqua Professor of International Management at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

In the paper, “How watching sports shapes zero-sum thinking: Correlational, experimental, and longitudinal evidence,” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kay and co-authors* hypothesized that “chronic sport followers” develop zero-sum beliefs through repeated exposure to win-lose dynamics.

The researchers found that exposure to professional sports directly causes people to develop or increase zero-sum thinking. They also showed that these effects are particularly noticeable during highly followed, high-stakes events, such as playoffs and world series.

“While zero-sum thinking may be the result of structural systems outside of the control of the individual, we showed that the way people choose to spend their time—watching sports, in this case—directly affects a win-lose view of the world,” Kay said.

This mindset, the authors argue, can shape how people negotiate, collaborate, and make decisions in ways that may limit the creation of societal value. 

Does success mean outperforming others? 

Economist Milton Friedman challenged the notion of “fixed pies”—the assumption that in economic interactions, one party can only gain at the expense of another.

Think about a job offer, Kay explained. If the parties are only bargaining over salary, the situation can look like a fixed-pie tradeoff, where someone’s gain is someone else’s loss—every extra dollar for the employee is a dollar less for the employer. 

But perhaps a company is very strict about pay and more flexible about benefits—vacation time, health insurance, even job location. The job applicant can trade off some of these benefits for a slightly smaller pay, and everyone gets something from the deal.

“In fact, most of the world doesn’t operate in terms of fixed pie,” Kay said. “The most successful deals are those where the parties find creative ways to trade something one has in excess with something else the other one has in excess, so that everyone benefits.”

Thinking in terms of scarcity and fixed pies, the authors write, can lead to more unethical behavior and worse outcomes, making productive collaboration harder.

What is the problem with sports?

If zero-sum thinking is harmful for negotiations and the broader economy, could an environment saturated with sports foster a narrow—and potentially unproductive—view of the world?

“We're by no means saying sports are bad,” Kay said. “They are a bonding experience that makes us feel closer to our community; they have health benefits, are exciting, and many people flat out love playing and watching sports.  But it’s important for us to understand what kinds of beliefs they foster and the impact they may have.”

The researchers tested their hypotheses on thousands of participants across 5 studies. Some of the settings showed a correlation between being an avid sports fan and zero-sum, exclusionary views of the world. But in controlled experiments, the researchers identified a direct causation: regardless of prior participants’ beliefs, just watching a clip of a sports competition made people score higher on measures of belief in a world of winners and losers, as compared to when the participants watched a sports tutorial video.

“It was specifically the competitive dynamic, the visible struggle between teams, that made the difference,” Kay said. 

The researchers even studied these effects over time. In an experiment with cricket fans during the Indian Premier League, they observed zero-sum thinking rise and fall over the course of the season, peaking during playoffs, then dropping down in the offseason. 

“When these winner-take-all moments are really salient in people’s minds, that zero-sum thinking becomes higher,” Kay said. “But then it dissipates again, as people stop thinking about the world in that way.”

Healthy competition versus zero-sum

Still, not all competition leads to zero-sum outcomes.

People can’t avoid win-lose framing in negotiations focused on only one issue or value, Kay said—like when the parties only focus on price or salary. But most of the time, the parties value multiple things that they can bring to the table.

Sports are not intrinsically bad, the authors maintain. At best, they can even promote a culture of collaboration—for example when the focus is on the teamwork necessary to accomplish a goal.

And the problem is not competition, Kay said. People can be competitive, can love to compete and can like to win, and still think that the world will thrive if we work and win together.

“Take someone like our basketball coach, Jon Scheyer,” Kay said. “I believe he's the most competitive person I know, but he also has a very clear view of the world as one in which cooperation increases common good.”

What this research shows is that sports “can do two things at once: unite people within groups while simultaneously promoting a worldview in which success requires someone else to fail,” the authors write. 

The takeaway is not to stop watching sports. Rather, it’s to recognize how easily our environment shapes the way we think.

“In a world where so many of our biggest challenges, from workplace cooperation to political polarization, require people to find solutions that work for everyone, we may end up missing that most of the time, life is not actually a zero-sum game,” Kay said.

*In addition to Kay, the paper is co-authored by Jinseok S. Chun of Sungkyunkwan University, and Hemant Kakkar of Indian School of Business.