How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science of Finding Love

by Logan Ury

Hitchers are also impacted by loss aversion. Behavioral economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified this phenomenon in a seminal paper. They explained that “losses loom larger than gains.” Let’s say you walk into a store to buy a new phone that costs $500. The salesperson hands you a coupon for $100 off your purchase. You’d be pretty pumped, right? Now imagine a different scenario, where you walk into the store and the salesperson says they were running a $100 off promotion, but it just ended the day before. You’d feel some pain at that loss. In one situation, you’re gaining $100, because the phone now costs $400 instead of $500. In the other situation, you’re losing $100, because you know you just missed out on that coupon. Both involved $100, so you might expect to experience equal amounts of pleasure and pain. But that’s not the case. Remember, losses loom larger than gains. Because of loss aversion, we experience twice as much psychological pain from losing that $100 as we experience pleasure from gaining $100. In other words, to feel the intensity of losing $100, you’d have to gain $200. We’ve learned to adapt our behavior to this cognitive bias: We do what we can to avoid losses. For our clothes, that means holding on to old T-shirts that we’d never buy if we encountered them in a store today. In dating, that means holding on to a bad relationship. We’re more terrified of the potential loss of our partner than intrigued by the potential gain of the person ...