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“This reform will not pass. Those who stand to lose will fight harder than those who stand to gain.” “Each of them thinks the other’s concessions are less painful. They are both wrong, of course. It’s just the asymmetry of losses.” “They would find it easier to renegotiate the agreement if they realized the pie was actually expanding. They’re not

Through decades of research with Tversky, Kahneman proved that humans all suffer from Cognitive Bias, that is, unconscious—and irrational—brain processes that literally distort the way we see the world. Kahneman and Tversky discovered more than 150 of them.

Different groups of participants stated their willingness to pay to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds. If saving birds is an economic good it should be a sum-like variable: saving 200,000 birds should be worth much more than saving 2,000 birds. In fact, the average contributions of the three groups were $80, $78, and $88 respectively. The number

As expected, broad framing blunted the emotional reaction to losses and increased the willingness to take risks.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, and near the end of that book he came around to the really central question: “What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us?”