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

Fuqua Professor Aaron Kay's research finds zero-sum thinking can lead to bad decisions

An image of an athlete

This is a summary of a story written by Gianluca Corinaldesi on Fuqua School of Business.

The win-at-all-costs ethos that sports fans adopt as they cheer their teams to victory – or agonizing defeat – may affect how they see the world and influence their behavior.

The zero-sum view of the world – in which everything is a competition for scarce resources – can lead people to unethical decisions, researchers say. 

“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.

Kay and co-authors address this in a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The researchers found that exposure to professional sports directly causes people to develop or increase zero-sum thinking. This behavior was particularly noticeable during the biggest, most high-profile sporting events like playoffs and baseball’s 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. 

But this discussion is nuanced, the researchers point out. Sports themselves are collaborative – they are largely team-oriented after all – and individual successes are often the result of teamwork. And competition, even within a team, often leads to better team results.

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. 

Read more about this study on Fuqua School of Business.