Research Highlights Article
March 27, 2026
How a win–lose mindset affects political and policy preferences
The origins and consequences of zero-sum thinking in the United States.
Source: cpenler
When Donald Trump entered the political scene, he relied heavily on rhetoric pitting one group against another—immigrants versus native-born citizens, China versus the United States, the Washington elite versus everyone else. Underlying this message is the idea that someone else's gain is your loss, which may have appealed to individuals across the political spectrum with a zero-sum view of the world.
In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva investigate zero-sum thinking, tracing its origins across generations and documenting its influence on policy preferences.
The authors build on the ideas of anthropologist George Foster, who described a worldview based on the "image of limited good"—the belief, observed in small preindustrial societies, that societal output is fixed and that any gain for one party necessarily diminishes another.
“We were interested in the long-run forces in American history that shape public opinion. And this seemed like an opportunity to study something very modern, but with links to the deepest forces in history,” Chinoy told the AEA in an interview.
To explore the importance of zero-sum thinking for political and policy preferences, the research team designed a large-scale survey of approximately 20,400 US residents, conducted in seven waves between 2020 and 2023. The sample was constructed to be broadly representative of the US population along key demographic dimensions, including age, race, income, and state of residence.
Rather than asking respondents a single abstract question about whether they think life is generally zero-sum, the authors asked about four specific areas: whether gains for one ethnic group come at the expense of others, whether economic gains for non-citizens hurt American citizens, whether one country's trade gains imply another's losses, and whether wealth accumulation by one income class disadvantages others.
Using a weighted average across these four domains, the researchers extracted an underlying measure of zero-sum thinking, reducing the risk that results simply mirrored respondents' preexisting political views.
Breaking down zero-sum thinking
The chart below shows the average of the zero-sum index for respondent subgroups. Horizontal bars are 95 percent confidence intervals.
Beyond attitudes, the survey also collected detailed ancestral information—the birthplaces, childhood locations, occupations, and relative economic standing of the respondents' parents and grandparents. This enabled the researchers to trace up to four generations of family history and link them to county-level historical data.
The authors’ found that a more zero-sum worldview was strongly associated with support for government redistribution, affirmative action for women and Black Americans, and more restrictive immigration policies, even after controlling for partisanship, income, education, and a range of other core beliefs. Democrats with the highest zero-sum scores were substantially more likely to favor stricter immigration controls, while Republicans with the highest zero-sum scores were more likely to support redistribution. For Chinoy, this cross-partisan pattern was among the most striking findings of the study.
"I think it is somewhat rare to find these worldviews that aren't simply correlated with political characteristics in the United States today, when political polarization is a story that explains a lot of the structure of our politics and economic thinking," he said.
The paper identifies three ancestral experiences that predict zero-sum thinking today. Greater intergenerational upward economic mobility is associated with less zero-sum views, consistent with the perception that advancement need not come at the expense of others. Having immigrant ancestors is similarly linked to a less zero-sum worldview, with the effect declining across successive generations. Conversely, ancestral exposure to enslavement—whether through direct ancestry or through growing up in counties that had higher shares of enslaved people in 1860—is associated with more zero-sum thinking, an effect that remains detectable in the present generation.
There are reasons that people adopt this worldview and perhaps a bit more empathy would go a long way in understanding this type of thinking instead of dismissing it as irrational.
Sahil Chinoy
The authors also found that younger Americans view the world in more zero-sum terms than older ones, a pattern the authors attribute to differences in economic growth experienced during childhood rather than to anything inherent about age itself.
Beyond its empirical findings, the paper suggests that zero-sum thinking should be understood as a rational response to the circumstances people and their ancestors have faced.
“There are reasons that people adopt this worldview and perhaps a bit more empathy would go a long way in understanding this type of thinking instead of dismissing it as irrational," Chinoy said.
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“Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences” appears in the March 2026 issue of the American Economic Review.