Aversion to lose why we care about the loss of more than acquisition Bashny.Net

What is "loss aversion to" why losses have on us is much greater psychological impact than the acquisition of the same size, and what happens in moments of winning or losing in our brain? Professor of Psychology at Stanford Russell A. Poldrak briefly explains.

Imagine this scenario: A friend offers to throw a coin and give you $ 20 if it falls tails up. If the result is an eagle, you give him $ 20. Would you accept such conditions?

For most of us to address the need to take the risk to the amount that we could win, was at least twice as much as the amount that we can lose. This trend is called "aversion to loss" reflects the idea that the losses are much greater psychological impact than the profits of the same size.




So why are we more sensitive to losses?

In 1979, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have developed a successful model of behavior, called "prospect theory", using the principles of aversion to losses, to explain how people evaluate uncertainty.

More recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered how to loss aversion can be operated at the neuronal level. In 2007, my colleagues and I found that areas of the brain that respond to the values ​​and rewards, more suppressed when we assess the potential loss, and they are activated when we estimate the gain of the same size.

In the study, we monitored the brain activity while participants decide whether they agree to gamble with real money. We found participants increased activity in neural networks associated with a reward, while being increased remuneration and decreased activity in the same circuits when the potential losses increased.

Perhaps most interesting was the fact that the reactions in the brain of the subjects were much more strongly in response to the losses than profits - a phenomenon we called the term "neural loss aversion»

. We also found that humans exhibit different degrees of sensitivity to rejection losses, and these extensive neuronal responses predict their different behavior. For example, people with severe and neural sensitivity to losses and winnings, the more risk-averse.

Another theory is that the loss may cause greater activity in brain regions that process emotion, for example, in an island, and the amygdala.

Neuroscientists Benedetto de Martino, Ralph Adolfs and Colin Camerer, who studied two people with a rare lesion of the amygdala and found that no one had shown an aversion to losses, suggested that the amygdala plays a key role.

A large study of 2013. Italian neuroscientist Nicola Canessa and his colleagues confirmed our initial findings and also showed that activity in the insular zone increases until the potential losses increase.

Probably, taken together, these data will help explain the aversion to loss, but an understanding of how these various neural processes work with different people in different situations, require further study.

Author: Elena Tulin