Many real-life examples-from interpersonal rivalries to international conflicts-suggest that people actively engage in competitive behavior even when it is negative sum (benefiting the self at a greater cost to others). This often leads to loss spirals where everyone-including the winner-ends up losing. Our research seeks to understand the psychology of such negative-sum competition in a controlled setting. To do so, we introduce an experimental paradigm in which paired participants have the option to repeatedly perform a behavior that causes a relatively small gain for the self and a larger loss to the other. Although they have the freedom not to engage in the behavior, most participants actively do so and incur substantial losses. We propose that an important reason behind the phenomena is shallow thinking-focusing on the immediate benefit to the self while overlooking the downstream consequences of how the behavior will influence their counterparts' actions. In support of the proposition, we find that participants are less likely to engage in negative-sum behavior, if they are advised to consider the downstream consequences of their actions, or if they are put in a less frenzied decision environment, which facilitates deeper thinking (acting in discrete vs. continuous time). We discuss how our results differ from prior findings and the implications of our research for mitigating negative-sum competition and loss spirals in real life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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战略互动中负和竞争的心理。

许多现实生活中的例子——从人际竞争到国际冲突——表明人们会积极参与竞争行为，即使它是负和的（以他人更大的成本为自己谋取利益）。这通常会导致损失螺旋式上升，每个人（包括获胜者）最终都会失败。我们的研究旨在了解受控环境下这种负和竞争的心理。为此，我们引入了一种实验范式，其中配对的参与者可以选择重复执行一种行为，这种行为会给自己带来相对较小的收益，而给对方带来较大的损失。尽管他们有不参与这种行为的自由，但大多数参与者主动这样做并遭受了重大损失。我们认为，这种现象背后的一个重要原因是肤浅的思维——只关注自身的眼前利益，而忽视了行为将如何影响对方行为的下游后果。为了支持这一命题，我们发现，如果参与者被建议考虑其行为的下游后果，或者如果他们被置于一个不那么疯狂的决策环境中，这有利于更深入的思考，那么他们就不太可能参与负和行为（在离散时间与连续时间中作用）。我们讨论了我们的结果与之前的发现有何不同，以及我们的研究对于减轻现实生活中的负和竞争和损失螺旋的影响。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。