Losers
Take All
How strong is envy? New research from a top economist provides
a startling answer.
JULY/AUGUST 2002—In his 1967 hit ballad "Everybody Loves a
Winner," songwriter William Bell mourned that "when you lose, you
lose alone.”
Were Bell alive today, he'd probably offer the opposite sentiment:
"Everybody hates a winner, and when you lose, you lose together."
According to new research, we not only envy winners, we often punish them-even
at our own expense.
"I may have unearthed the dark side of human nature," says
economist Andrew Oswald of Warwick University in England. Oswald's ingenious
study, conducted with colleague Daniel Zizzo of Oxford University, tested how
willing we are to burn away others' wealth, even when we have to give up our
own to do so. Participants played an anonymous betting game at a computer
terminal. The money they received to play the game-along with any winnings-was
theirs to keep. As they played, the screen showed exactly how much other
players were winning. At the end, players could secretly burn away other
people's money-but only if they burned 25 percent of their own money, too.
Of 116 study participants-playing several games in anonymous groups of
four-almost two-thirds chose to burn other players' winnings. And this was in
spite of the high cost-burn a dollar of another's money, lose 25 cents of your
own. Losers punished winners, which might seem to be motivated by a kind of
perverse logic, driven by envy and resentment. But even winners punished
others, though they punished both poor and rich alike-reducing their own
windfalls.
"We were shocked by how much people were willing to hurt themselves to
burn other people's money," Oswald says. "We really thought that a
cost of 25 percent would kill off all destructive behavior, but it didn't. And
most people didn't give very clear explanations as to why they'd done it. I don't
believe they fully understood what they were feeling. This is a drive, not a
cool-headed, rational choice.”
The drive, Oswald speculates, may have to do with status, and the fact that
relative rank is an important part of life. "We're very driven by a concern
about rank, and there is only so much rank to go around in any society. Wages,
for instance, are relative. In my own life, on a university faculty, I find
that my colleagues are incredibly interested in what others are earning. It
goes back to rank. People are more interested in rank than in having resources,
per se. Status comes from where you are in the ranking." But how does
relative rank account for winners punishing all others, rather than simply
exulting in their top status? Oswald speculates that winners struck
preemptively, in order to preserve their rank: They expected the losers to
punish them and so they punished the losers first.
Oswald seems to have uncovered, in a stark way, something we all
subconsciously recognize: flaunting our success may rouse deep envy in others.
A tendency to "play down" one's winnings is evident in the speeches
of Nobel Prize winners, says Pam Benoit, a communication professor at the
University of Missouri-Columbia and author of Telling the Success Story: Acclaiming and Disclaiming
Discourse (State University of New York Press, 1997). When Benoit
studied individual success stories, she found that Nobel Prize winners tend to
detract from their success in their acceptance speeches. "They just won
the Nobel Prize, and that has such enormous status they don't need to enhance
it," Benoit says. "So they talk about the others who were
responsible, the people who worked in their labs, the scientists whose
shoulders they stand upon. They appear very modest.”
Research shows that children learn the benefits of modesty by age eight. And
a 2002 study conducted by Dawn Watling and Robin Banerjee of the University of
Sussex in England seems to show that modesty and rank are indeed linked.
Ninety-two children between ages eight and eleven were shown social scenarios
that reflected modest or immodest behavior. Researchers then asked the children
whether the behavior was a good thing and why. In scenes where children
interacted with their peers, the kids thought modest behavior was good: They
believed they'd be better liked that way. When interacting with adults,
however, who rank higher than children, confidence and boasting were seen as a
useful strategy. "Children probably learn modesty from their peers, not
from adults," Watling concludes. "Now we want to study whether
children feel they should act modest with peers, but confident with older
children.”
Oswald's study gives us uneasy insight into the urge to punish winners, and
yet it raises as many questions as it answers. For instance, will a majority
still burn money if it costs half of their own, or three quarters? And what if
the game was played for large sums of money? "I don't believe that would make
a difference," Oswald says, "but I'd like to find out. We know that
at any given time, individuals enjoy moving up in a ranking. In contrast, if an
entire society is lifted up by a wave of prosperity, no given individual feels
much happier. What if we ran this study in a very poor, developing country,
where the sums we offer are worth a fortune, to see if participants were
cooler-headed?”
Oswald wonders if there is a way to harness or foster a kind of group spirit
that will counteract the urge to punish.
"In my lab, half of all the potential [financial] resources were
destroyed," Oswald says, "and so the group as a whole became poorer,
because the concern for rank overwhelmed them. Maybe I could design a study
where they shared knowledge and cooperation, so that the group as a whole came
away with more money. The question is, can we develop some set of institutions
that gets us to a group outcome where everyone is richer? This is a very
important issue for society.”
Swiss economist Ernst Fehr agrees. An expert on altruism and punishment at
the University of Zurich, Fehr says that people compete for rank, and that
relative rank is important for survival. However, he also has found that humans
grouped together will cooperate and, as a result, often will punish defectors,
or those individuals who don't cooperate. This punishment can be costly for an
individual, but enhances the survival of the group. Fehr dubs it altruistic
punishment and considers it a major motivator in social interaction. "When
we run experiments where people can stay together, cooperation rates are much
higher than if people interact with strangers," Fehr says.
But what of those winners at the very top who, rather than preemptively
punishing others, become philanthropists to society at large? In his 1889 essay
"The Gospel of Wealth," magnate Andrew Carnegie suggested that the
duty of a rich man was to live modestly, provide moderately for his dependents,
and regard himself as "the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren,"
administering his fortune to produce the greatest gain for the community as a
whole. This seems a form of pure altruism, and science has long debated why it
exists.
Sometimes winners give all, rather than take all: but the answer to that
particular mystery may lie within the human heart rather than the laboratory.
Originally published in Science & Spirit magazine.
