Abundance and Zero-sum Mindsets – How Cognitive Bias and Distortion Affect Our Thinking

Based on my observations and thoughts, both abundance scenarios and zero-sum scenarios do exist.

At the same time, people accidentally view many abundant scenarios as zero-sum situations.

Cultivating abundant mindset leads to greater personal growth, good vibes and happiness.  Cultivating an abundant mindset, I believe, includes understanding the ideas of cognitive distortion and cognitive bias and how they may relate to zero-sum and abundant thought-processes.

This article will demonstrate some examples of zero-sum thinking, abundant thinking, and how cognitive distortion and biases may lead to zero-sum thinking.  Moreover, the article will provide multiple ways to create abundant thinking patterns, as well as some ways to identify zero-sum mental traps.

Do Zero-Sum Scenarios Exist?

Zero-sum scenarios do exist in certain ways and on certain levels.  Here are some examples:

1. The fact that only one object can occupy a certain place in time and space.  In other words, two fast-moving cars cannot both occupy the same place on the road at the same time.  It’s a “zero-sum” game for that specific spot in space-time. For day-to-day living, it’s one car or the other.
2. In a traditional sports championships, only one team will usually be considered the winner of the championship. It’s a “zero-sum” game for who wins the championship.
3. In 2016, if someone searched for a certain phrase on a website search engine, say “how to make a salad with apples”, there would be a one URL that would be listed first at a given time.

Do Abundance Scenarios Exist?

Yes, abundance scenarios also exist in many ways.  These examples might fit the bill:

1. Two people can work together. By helping each other, they can grow more food than they would individually.
2. When one musician teaches another person how to play music, more people can enjoy good music.
3. When person A pays another person B do a job. Person B gets paid and Person A receives a service that they might otherwise do themselves.

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“Fixing” Zero-sum Situations using an Abundance Mentality

From the previous examples about zero-sum situations, here’s some solutions using “abundance mentality” that happen in real life.

1. If two fast-driving cars just stay in their own lane, or even just coordinate their movements, there’s plenty of space to share. And they’ll both get there fast.
2. In a sports championship, regardless of who wins, both team can play well and be considered great teams.  In the long run, fans don’t come to see boring performances, they come to see awesome games! See Luka Modrić.
3. Even if one website comes out on top in the search rankings, both websites can still be great. And, both websites can still get a lot of visitors, from different search phrases and from different referrals.

People Can Confuse Zero-Sum and Abundance Scenarios

Many people confuse zero-sum situations and abundance situations.

What are some examples of this confusion and why does this happen?

For starters, cognitive bias and distortion play a big role. All-or-nothing or black-or-white thinking are probably two of the biggest logical fallacies that create “zero-sum thinking”.  Seeing something as black-or-white or all-or-nothing usually leads to the conclusion that something is a zero-sum situation.

Plenty of solutions to this challenge

Use abundance thinking by jumping outside of the either-or mentality and look for a third (or fourth or fifth …) option.

Here’s an example from 2017:

Winning an award at the Grammys

To a great extent, art celebrates abundance.

Winning, in and of itself, is a zero-sum game.  There’s a winner and loser, though they can both be great players in the game.

In other words, the fact that one artist produces great art doesn’t mean that another artist can’t produce great art.

In fact, most artists learn from the works of other great artists. So, by producing great art, you would be helping others artists to produce great art.  Musicians all have others artists that influenced them. In other fields, the popular phrase, “standing on the shoulders of giants,” comes to mind.

Sure there are probably issues with the Grammys.  But the true point is about producing great art, not about winning awards.  People get angry about the winning and losing, not about the great art.

A few thoughts:

• Do you enjoy a piece of music more or less because it has won an award?
• People confuse the winning with the music.
• While not everyone can win the same award, everyone can strive to create their own great music.

Abundance, Zero-Sum Thinking, Cognitive Biases and Distortions

Black-or-white thinking is a cognitive bias, while all-or-nothing thinking falls in the cognitive distortion category.

This section provides a rundown of some cognitive biases and distortions. To learn about each bias and distortion, check out the links to other sites provided.

What are Cognitive Biases and Cognitive Distortions?

Cognitive distortions are simply ways that our mind convinces us of something that isn’t really true. These inaccurate thoughts are usually used to reinforce negative thinking or emotions — telling ourselves things that sound rational and accurate, but really only serve to keep us feeling bad about ourselves. (from PychCentral)

A cognitive bias is a mistake in reasoning, evaluating, remembering, or other cognitive process, often occurring as a result of holding onto one’s preferences and beliefs regardless of contrary information. Psychologists study cognitive biases as they relate to memory, reasoning, and decision-making. (from Chegg)

According to a response on a thread on Quora, by Ranjith Jaganathan,

Cognitive distortions are the thoughts that leads to misrepresentation of the reality. In this, the thoughts or thought patterns that an individual possess intervenes with how they perceive the reality, which is often distorted.

Whereas in Cognitive bias, our personal, emotional, social, moral [background?] and other variables interferes while judging an event, which often leads us to make illogical inferences about an event.

Distortions manifest in depression, anxiety, and other psycho-pathological states. Cognitive biases may lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, prejudice and often it paves way to irrationality.

Cognitive Biases

You can check out Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases. Here’s 25 Biases from 25CognitiveBiases.com:

1. Reward and Punishment Super-Response Tendency
2. Liking/Loving Tendency
3. Disliking/Hating Tendency
4. Doubt-Avoidance Tendency
5. Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency
6. Curiosity Tendency
7. Kantian Fairness Tendency
8. Envy/Jealousy Tendency
9. Reciprocation Tendency
10. Influence-From-Mere Association Tendency
11. Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial
12. Excessive Self-Regard Tendency
13. Over-Optimism Tendency
14. Deprival-Superreaction Tendency
15. Social-Proof Tendency
16. Contrast-Misreaction Tendency
17. Stress-Influence Tendency
18. Availability-Misweighing Tendency
19. Use-it-or-Lose-It Tendency
20. Drug-Misinfluence Tendency
21. Senescence-Misinfluence Tendency
22. Authority-Misinfluence Tendency
23. Reason-Respecting Tendency
24. Lollapalooza Tendency

Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive distortions can be defined as mental conclusions based on faulty logic.  Most everyone engages in cognitive distortions.

10 Big Cognitive Distortions

Here’s a short list (here’s a pdf of the 10 distortions) from Dr. David Gray found in Feeling Good:

1. All-or-Nothing thinking
2. Overgeneralization
3. Mental Filter
4. Disqualifying the Positive
5. Jumping to Conclusions
6. Magnification
7. Emotional Reason
8. Should Statements
9. Labeling and mislabeling
10. Personalization

Check out some longer lists of cognitive distortions here, here and here.

Persuasion and Cognitive Biases/Distortions

How Persuasive Techniques can employ elements of Cognitive Bias

Check out this article at Ciphr talking about cognitive biases and persuasion. Here’s a quick breakdown of the article

1. The bandwagon bias – persuade someone showing by the perception that others find it valuable.
2. The ‘confirmation’ bias – use an argument that reinforces someone preexisting beliefs.
3. The ‘outcome’ bias – don’t talk about risks, just talk about how great the outcome will be.
4. Overconfidence – using someone’s overconfidence in their own abilities to convince them of something.
5. The ‘placebo’ effect – by believing in a particular, it will increase the likelihood of that outcome occurring.
6. The ‘salience’ bias – focusing on the elements that people already perceive in order to skip over elements they haven’t looked into.
7. The ‘selective perception’ bias – related to the confirmation bias, but basically people will want to focus on the things they believe in.
8. The ‘survivorship’ bias – using only the positive aspects of previously successful experience to persuade someone. In fact, sometimes what we can learn from mistakes can make it better.  Famous example – Abraham Wald.
9. The ‘zero-risk’ bias – people prefer things with no risk, therefore downplay anything risky.
10. The ‘recency’ bias – people are more influenced by whatever they last heard or saw. Therefore, show them things that confirm an argument before making the argument.

The Aristotelian/Socratic forms of persuasion

1. Ethos – an appeal based a person’s character
2. Logos – an appeal based on logic
3. Pathos – an appeal based on emotional content

Here’s a brief worksheet on marketing and ethos, logos and pathos.

The Scott Adam’s Levels of Persuasion

1. Identity beats analogy
2. Analogy beats reason
3. Reason beats nothing

Scott Adams on Trump’s persuasive skills. Based on an interview at Washington Post, as summarized by Inc.:

1. Understand that people are mostly irrational
2. Appeal to emotions
3. When you appeal to emotions, facts don’t matter
4. When facts don’t matter, you can never be wrong
5. Warp reality until you achieve your goal
6. Master identity politics

Drawing from the 2016 USA Presidential Campaign Debates, here’s some more persuasive techniques that use cognitive distortions and biases.

Relating Distortions, Biases, Persuasion, and Abundance

What is the root cause of most of the distortions and biases?

I argue it’s basically not seeing the possibilities of abundance or, in other words, seeing things as a zero-sum game.

Distortions, biases and persuasion based on illogic all can solved by viewing through a lens of abundance. There’s more details involved. Understanding all 10 of the cognitive distortions and the many cognitive biases all can help one to see more clearly and in a constructive way. But, as a rule of thumb (in most day-to-day, non-survival-based living), just look to see if a thought or argument follows the logic of abundance.

Seeing through Lens of Abundance

Looking for abundant possibilities in any situation will probably be first step to a great solution.

Zero-Sum vs Abundance vs Over-optimism

Zero-sum

• On a very basic, short-term level, zero-sum occurs often.
• But in practical life, there’s almost always other paths to take that will probably produce better long-term results

Abundance

• Seeing and creating solutions that are win-win or where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Over-optimism

• May be based on mis-perception of reality or on cognitive biases.
• You can still be abundant without being disconnected from practical factors.
• Unlike some of the other biases, over-optimism can produce positive results, and may lead to abundance.
• But the more you can create solutions based on reality, the more successful the solution will be.
• Check out this article about over-optimisim

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