Your loss is my gain

I recently heard about a phenomenon that got me thinking about how collaboration sometimes plays out in our teams…

Apparently, if you put a bunch of crabs into a bucket, they’ll panic and try to climb out. In their efforts, with smooth walls making escape impossible, they end up grabbing at whatever's nearby, including each other, and pull one another back down, dooming the entire group.

Although the crabs don’t actually intend to pull each other down, crab mentality is often applied to human behaviour to describe how people in a group undermine a more successful member out of jealousy, resentment, or competitiveness and stunt their progress.

Why do we perceive others success as our failure?

One explanation for crab mentality is zero-sum thinking, a psychological construct derived from game-theory where individuals perceive that they only gain at the expense of others’ loss. Deeply ingrained beliefs like, a finite amount of goods in the world, contribute to false beliefs and tendencies to perceive social relations as a zero-sum game. Like saying the more pieces of the progress pie that is cut, the smaller the piece you will receive.

[throwback to my newsletter about winning the infinite game]

The findings of recent large-scale studies suggests zero-sum thinking can function as an underlying mindset, a general theory about how the world works that predisposes someone to interpret all kinds of unrelated situations through a win-lose lens.

One study found that people with a stronger zero-sum mindset were more likely to see hostility where none existed, and this bias translated into less cooperation even when the stakes were highest.

The research points to three main psychological triggers for zero-sum beliefs:

• feeling threatened

• perceiving that resources are scarce

• reacting on impulse

  
  

By this logic, the antidote to anti-cooperation or, the way out of the bucket, is to dissolve the trap through creative reframing. Rather than fighting over how to divide a fixed pie or assuming that only one individual can climb out of the bucket at a time, they key is changing perceptions around the problem.

Finding a way to perceive the pie as larger depends on creative reframing skills on one axis and capacity (time, space, motivation) on the other.

I look forward to diving deeper into these two with you next time!

In the meantime, what kind of shared efforts in your workplace might be perceived through a win-lose lens? I read everything.