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.
We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.
The only thing that disturbs me is that many psychopaths say they had a very happy childhood.
A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors. . . . The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain
Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.
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