Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don’t trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships — people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.
I am catching up on some reading from the New York Times, so I’ll be making some quick posts here.
I have a colleague who was talking about academic motivation one day. He proposed that students see the class as a competition, with a winner and a lot of losers. I had never seen my classes that way; to me, everyone could be winners.
So I surveyed my class one day to see how many believed achievement in class was a competition, and how many didn’t. Only one-third of them saw it as a competition. I was relieved by that. But also I encourage students to form study groups, work together on their online quizzes, etc. It may very well be the zeitgeist that the professor sets up that creates either competition or cooperation.
There was an article on this in the NY Times. The author is a business professor and he says that in business schools the zeitgeist is generally one of completion with your classmates. He was disturbed by this and describes how he went about changing that zeitgeist by encouraging cooperation.
The quote above also relates to my research on peace and conflict. I believe that there are some people who generally have what I would call a “zero-sum orientation” where they generally see intergroup (and perhaps even interpersonal) relations as a zero-sum game: one where there is a winner, and by definition only one winner; if I win you must lose.
There have been several papers that tie zero-sum beliefs to intergroup relations, but thus far it seems no one has developed a good measure for zero-sum beliefs. Usually these measures have included a few questions to tap this orientation, but the internal reliability is often marginal at best (e.g., Ho, Sidanius, Pratto, Levin, Thomsen, Kteily, & Sheehy-Skeffington, 2012). There have also been articles looking at zero-sum beliefs within a particular domain, such as racism (e.g., Norton & Sommers, 2011).
I believe it may be a good time to consider developing a valid and reliable zero-sum orientation scale as a basic test of either trait or state zero-sum beliefs.
Source: Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve – The New York Times
