Second, being wrong hurts us more than being right feels good. We know from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on loss aversion, part of prospect theory (which won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), that losses in general feel about two times as bad as wins feel good. So winning $100 at blackjack feels as good to us as losing $50 feels bad to us. Because being right feels like winning and being wrong feels like losing, that means we need two favorable results for every one unfavorable result just to break even emotionally. Why not live a smoother existence, without the swings, especially when the losses affect us more intensely than the wins?
Second, being wrong hurts us more than being right feels good. We know from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on loss aversion, part of prospect theory (which won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), that losses in general feel about two times as bad as wins feel good. So winning $100 at blackjack feels as good to us as losing $50
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Roughly speaking, the prospect of losing something makes you twice as miserable as the prospect of gaining the same thing makes you happy.
Loss aversion: Losing feels worse than winning feels good, and it’s easier to stand pat and protect what we have.
A preoccupation with wanting to be right or wanting to be perceived as being right, explains people’s tendency to focus on why the market is doing what it is doing instead of what it is doing.