The undoing project

This book is making me to think about some habits and false concepts we use to fall in a daily basis. There are some interesting parts of the book for re-read from time to time.

People regretted what they have done, and what they wished they hadn’t done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have. The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo.

 

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people’s desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure pain.

 

People did not chose between things. They chose between descriptions of things. Economists, and anyone else who wanted to believe that human beings were rational, could rationalize, or try to rationalize, loss aversion.

 

The endowment effect was a psychological idea with economic consequences. People attached some strange extra value to what ever they happened to own, simply because they owned it, and so proved surprisingly reluctant to part with their possessions, or endowments, even when trading them made economic sense.

 

The emotions of unrealized possibility: these emotions could be described using simple math. Their intensity was a product of two variables: the desirability of the alternative and the possibility of the alternative.

 

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