Human beings hate to lose. They hate to lose money, games, jobs, respect, partners, and, yes, status. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated this in a series of experiments in which they asked subjects if they would be willing to accept a gamble where they had a 50 percent chance of winning, say, $100, but an equal chance of losing $100. They found that most people refuse the gamble. The reason? Human beings are loss averse. They are much more motivated to try to reclaim losses than they are to try to make gains.
