Zero-sum bias in politicized problem solving

Zero-sum bias refers to the tendency to believe that anything gained by one side is lost by the other when in fact win-win outcomes are available. Prior research has documented the bias in several domains but little is known about what triggers it. As politics is a hotbed of zero-sum beliefs, we hypothesized that politicizing problems would act as either a situational trigger or inhibitor for partisans and that this would lead them to propose qualitatively different solutions. We report five studies that find evidence for our hypotheses. We demonstrate that Democrats find less-effective solutions to a problem when it is framed in terms of corporate tax cuts, and more-effective solutions when a formally identical problem is framed in terms of pro-immigration policies, than when it is framed non-politically. Republicans exhibit the opposite pattern. Thus, we find differential problem-solving performance between the two political groups only in the politicized problem frames. We show that the political frames interfere with the process of problem solving per se, as opposed to rendering some solutions socially inadmissible. We also show that this interference impacts participants not by dialing up or down the effort they put in, but by constraining their way of thinking about the space of possible solutions. Finally, we demonstrate that the outcome of the problem-solving process is predicted by the presence or absence of zero-sum beliefs about the particular political frame, but not by participants' affective response to it.