I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.
Interpretation
People experience loss more intensely than gain, reflecting an asymmetry in human emotions.
This quote by Daniel Kahneman emphasizes the concept of loss aversion in psychology, which suggests that the negative emotional response to losing money or resources is greater than the positive emotional response to gaining an equivalent amount. As a result, individuals are often more affected by losses, which influences their decision-making and risk assessment, leading to a psychological bias where avoiding loss becomes more significant than acquiring gains.
In practice
In a financial workshop discussing investment strategies, one might say, 'As Kahneman noted, we feel more pain when we lose money than joy when we gain it, so be prudent in your choices.'
We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience.
Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has, and I hope that REBT teaches them how to do it.
It was as if personality itself had a 'face'. This non-physical face of personality seemed to be the real key to personality change. It remained scarred, distorted, 'ugly' or inferior the person himself acted out this role in his behaviour regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this 'face of personality' could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery.
Interpretations, criticisms, diagnoses, and judgments of others are actually alienated expressions of our unmet needs.
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