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?

Annie Duke • Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman indicates that on average, we are twice as loss-averse compared to seeking a gain209

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Roughly speaking, losses hurt about twice as much as gains make you feel good.

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As Columbia Business School professor Eric Johnson explained to us, the more meaningful a potential loss is, the more loss averse we become. In other words, the more there is on the line, the easier it is to get swept into an irrational decision.

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And what if the bet is even higher? Suddenly, we have a corrective for many of the follies of human reason. “If we imagine to ourselves that we have to stake the happiness of our whole life on the truth of any proposition, our judgment drops its air of triumph, we take the alarm, and discover the actual strength of our belief,” says Kant.

Maria Konnikova • The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

Just by how I position the $20, I can make you happy or disgusted by it. I tell you that not to expose our decision making as emotional and irrational. We’ve already seen that. What I am saying is that while our decisions may be largely irrational, that doesn’t mean there aren’t consistent patterns, principles, and rules behind how we act. And once

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are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains.”3 This is why putting ourselves out there, engaging people who might dismiss or reject us, is so scary. Because in the one-off situation, the pain it will cause is perceived as stronger than the positive feelings of acceptance. The trick is to start looking at outcomes in the aggregate

Shane Parrish • The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

When we treat outcome fielding as a bet, it pushes us to field outcomes more objectively into the appropriate buckets because that is how bets are won. Winning feels good. Winning is a positive update to our personal narrative. Winning is a reward. With enough practice, reinforced by the reward of feeling good about ourselves, thinking of fielding