“Do not teach them how to fish”: The effect of zero-sum beliefs on help giving.

How do zero-sum beliefs-the beliefs that one person's success is inevitably balanced by others' failure -affect people's willingness to help their peers and colleagues? In nine studies (and 2 supplementary studies, N = 2,324), we find consistent evidence for the relationship between the belief that success is zero-sum and help giving preferences. Across various hypothetical scenarios and actual help giving decisions, and even when the effort required for helping was minimal, zero-sum beliefs negatively predicted participants' willingness to help their colleagues learn how to succeed on their own (i.e., autonomy-oriented help). In contrast, the belief that success can only be achieved at others' expense did not affect participants' willingness to offer the kind of help that would completely solve their colleagues' problems for them (i.e., dependency-oriented help). Moreover, we find that the effect of zero-sum beliefs on the reluctance to give autonomy-oriented help is mediated by concerns about losing one's status to the recipient, and that removing these concerns about status loss mitigates the negative effect of zero-sum beliefs on help giving. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this robust yet nuanced link between the belief that success is zero-sum and prosocial helping behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).