I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I have dual loyalties. Don’t get me wrong, I am a Trojan through and through — but I would be lying if I said that no part of me still feels like a Wolverine. I grew up in Michigan, and I spent my childhood cheering “Go Blue.”

Since USC joined the Big Ten, my two teams, which would’ve seldom gone head-to-head before, have begun facing off routinely. Last year in a very close game at the Big House, Michigan beat USC. But this year the Wolverines were coming onto our turf — they were playing at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. 

I’ll be honest; I was conflicted. I couldn’t root for both teams to win. This game was quite literally a zero-sum game. For one team to win, the other had to lose.

My feelings about this particular game had me thinking about other zero-sum games in my life. For those unfamiliar, a zero-sum game is a concept in game theory, where, for one team to win, the other must lose. There cannot be two winners in a zero-sum game. 

Although college football is quite literally a zero-sum game, I was trying to make it anything but. While I was trying to make college football into a game where everyone could win, I came to the realization that I was turning things that aren’t games into one elsewhere in my life. 

As the federal government shutdown began, with access to healthcare and more at stake, my zero-sum mentality took over — for governance to resume, in my mind, one party had to lose. 

I am not alone in this. This mentality is shared by many Americans. We are living in a time of heightened polarization, extremism and cyberbalkanization — just as balkanization refers to the division of geographic groups, cyberbalkanization, coined in 1997 by researchers Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, is the split and fragmentation of special interest groups digitally. 

Zero-sum thinking has infected much of our culture. A rise in polarization aligns with a rise in zero-sum thinking — and this rise in zero-sum thinking has absolutely detrimental effects on our society because people with a zero-sum mentality are less likely to be vocal about issues they care about. 

A 2024 study by the Columbia Business School showed that people who held a specific viewpoint and were zero-sum thinkers were less likely to talk to people who opposed their perspective. It is hard to talk to people you disagree with, but it is the only way our society works, as the current government shutdown is proof of what happens when we don’t. 

Instead of treating funding negotiations as a shared responsibility, lawmakers approach them like a battle to conquer. If the other side has a partial victory, it’s seen as their own loss.  Refusing to talk across the aisle simply does not work — that zero-sum logic leads to stalemate, and this stalemate resulted in shutdown — leaving thousands of Americans caught in the crossfire of a political game where everyone loses.

The trap of zero-sum thinking is easy to fall into. Polarization is so much easier to come across within the echo chambers of the internet; it offers a false clarity where one side wins, the other loses and the story ends there. It is clear that online extremism directly aligns with this zero-sum mentality — I understand, I often think to myself that any victory for the other side is a loss for mine. 

And a vicious cycle is created, one where we believe that if we are right, the other side must be wrong across the board. This is exacerbated by how the internet plays into our own personal confirmation bias, feeding us content that both affirms our existing beliefs and vilifies others. 

As we become more prone to zero-sum thinking, we become less likely to work to find common ground. It’s comforting to always be confident in one’s own beliefs, but ultimately, this mindset shrinks the world into something black-and-white, lacking nuance and complexity, where the schism between “us” and “them” is painfully wide. 

But if that is the case, how can we expect to make any progress? This mentality turns our lives into a game, and people into teams. It turns real-life issues like healthcare and citizenship into wins and losses. We need to understand that goals can be mutual, and that we should not avoid a hard conversation because the other side of winning means we lose. We must come back to the table.

USC won the game. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t cheer when both teams scored a touchdown.