What Prospect Theory tells us
by Adam Taggart
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity
As biological organisms, humans are motivated by pain and pleasure.
But interestingly, while we tend to think of these as equal motivators, they aren’t. We humans are wired to be more risk averse than pleasure-seeking. As the works of Nobel recipient Daniel Kahneman explained:
Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on gains and losses. For an organism operating close to the edge, the loss of a day’s food could amount to death, while the gain of an extra days food could lead to increased comfort but (unless it could be costlessly stored) would not lead to a corresponding increase in life expectancy.
And through the related findings of Prospect Theory, we actually know how much more we hate losses than we like gains: about twice as much: