Posted by I have spent far too many hours scrolling through social media, watching other people’s vacation photos and career announcements, feeling that peculiar mix of admiration and inadequacy that seems to define modern existence. What I did not realize until much later was that this exhausting mental gymnastics has deep roots in something sociologists call zero sum thinking, and understanding it might be the key to making sense of why we compete so relentlessly with each other. Explore how zero sum thinking shapes modern social competition, from social media comparisons to workplace dynamics, and why we cannot stop comparing ourselves to others.
The concept of zero sum games comes from game theory, but it has wormed its way into how we structure our entire social world. In a zero sum game, one person’s gain is necessarily another person’s loss. Think of a pie that cannot grow larger. If I take a bigger slice, you get less. Simple mathematics, devastating social consequences.
Most of us walk around with this mental model lodged firmly in our brains, even when it makes absolutely no sense. I remember sitting in a graduate seminar where a classmate got praised for her insightful comment, and I felt myself deflate slightly, as if her intelligence somehow diminished my own. The professor had not declared there could only be one smart person in the room. Nobody was handing out a single trophy for best student. Yet there I was, locked in invisible competition, treating knowledge itself as a scarce resource that we had to fight over.
This is where sociology gets really interesting. We do not just compete for genuinely limited resources like jobs or housing. We compete for recognition, status, and validation, things that could theoretically be abundant but that we have collectively decided to treat as scarce. Social competition becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we believe there can only be so many winners, we create social structures that ensure this becomes true.
The sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote about conspicuous consumption more than a century ago, describing how people buy expensive things not for their utility but to signal status. He understood something fundamental about social competition and zero sum thinking. When my neighbor buys a luxury car, they are not just purchasing transportation. They are making a move in an ongoing game of social positioning, and that move only works if most people cannot make the same move. The value lies in the exclusivity, in being above someone else.
What fascinates me about this dynamic is how it shapes entire institutions. Our education system runs on zero sum logic with its rankings, selective admissions, and curved grading systems. I have watched students who could be collaborating and learning together instead guard their notes like state secrets because only a certain percentage can receive top grades. The knowledge they are acquiring is not actually limited, everyone could theoretically master the material, but we have designed a system that requires some to fail so others can succeed.
The workplace operates similarly. Promotions and raises often come from a fixed budget, turning colleagues into competitors. Even when cooperation would benefit everyone, the structure of rewards pushes us toward zero sum thinking. I have been in meetings where someone shot down a good idea simply because they did not come up with it first. The goal was not to solve the problem but to be seen as the problem solver, and in a zero sum framework, these are mutually exclusive aims.
Social media has turbocharged all of this in ways that Veblen could never have imagined. Every platform is designed around metrics that are inherently comparative. Followers, likes, shares, these are currencies in a grand status competition, and the algorithms ensure we are constantly aware of where we rank. The comparison is no longer just with our immediate neighbors but with everyone everywhere. The zero sum game has gone global.
But here is what keeps me up at night. Most of the things we compete over are not actually zero sum. Happiness is not zero sum. Creativity is not zero sum. Love and friendship are not zero sum. Yet we have become so habituated to competitive thinking that we apply it everywhere, even where it destroys the very things we claim to want.
I think about parents competing to get their children into the “best” preschools, as if early education were a tournament rather than a developmental process. Or friends who cannot quite celebrate each other’s successes because they are too busy calculating their own relative position. We have taken the logic of genuine scarcity and applied it to domains where it creates artificial scarcity.
The tragedy is that zero sum thinking often produces zero sum outcomes, not because resources are actually limited but because our beliefs shape our behaviors. When we approach social life as a competitive game with clear winners and losers, we build institutions and relationships that reflect this worldview. We create the scarcity we fear.
Reference
American Psychological Association. (2019). Social comparison and social media: Psychology of online status competition. APA PsycNet. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2023). Workplace competition and employee performance metrics. Occupational Outlook Quarterly. https://www.bls.gov
National Institute of Mental Health. (2022). Social media use and mental health: The impact of comparison on well-being. NIMH Publications. https://www.nimh.nih.gov