Even more powerful than our urge for more is our resistance to less. We try even harder to avoid losses than we do to achieve gains. That’s the insight that earned the Nobel Prize in Economics for Princeton University’s Daniel Kahneman, for work he did with Amos Tversky on prospect theory.11 Prospect theory challenges the assumption that people are rational agents who assess gains and losses the same way; in fact, it asserts that people are much more affected emotionally by losing something than they are by gaining the same thing.
