“We strongly prefer to avoid losses over acquiring gains.”
Imagine you loose $100 and I happen to be the lucky guy finding it. Loss aversion tells us that – unfortunately – you became more unhappy than that I became happier… Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late friend Amos Tversky discovered that losses are roughly twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.

Therefore: phrasing the same outcomes as though it’s a loss can have a bigger impact than phrasing the same outcome as a gain.

But there’s more magic to the loss aversion effect. The Prospect Theory of Kahneman and Tversky explains that …

“If we figured it out ourselves, we like it better”
The self-generation affect effect (or the ‘not invented here – bias’ as people like Dan Ariely phrase it) is the cognitive version of the physical labor-love effect. Not only does physical effort increase liking, it works just as fine for cognitive effort… We tend to like ideas and information better if it is generated by our own mind (instead of ideas that we read or hear from someone else). Even if people invest just a small amount of cognitive energy in an idea or solution, they like it much more …