“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 …