![]() “Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle,” they wrote. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.” It wasn’t hard to imagine why this might be-a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival. “It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. ![]() “The greater sensitivity to negative rather than positive changes is not specific to monetary outcomes,” wrote Amos and Danny. To get them to flip a coin for ten thousand bucks, you had to offer them even better odds than you offered them for flipping it for a hundred. ![]() If they were going to lose $100 if the coin landed on heads, they would need to win $200 if it landed on tails. To get most people to flip a coin for a hundred bucks, you had to offer them far better than even odds. ![]() That is, when it was like most gambles in life. The story follows the rise and decline of a tremendous friendship between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. “The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain. The Undoing Project is not a novel, but instead, the book provides a non-fiction, analytical account of the birth of behavior economics, a kind of middle way between psychoanalysis and economic theory. ![]()
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