I have the worst luck in traffic. I switch into one lane. It slows down. So I switch back. Sure enough, as soon as I do, that lane slows down, and the cars in the other lane speed up. Argg. No matter which lane I’m in, it feels like I’m going slower than the guy next to me.
I get the same luck in grocery store and movie theater lines. No matter which one I choose, it seems to go slower than the other one. It’s a source of constant misery.
Why is this?
The answer is what behavioral economists call loss aversion: greater sensitivity to losses than gains. Put simply, we hate losing twice as much as we love winning. The pain of losing a hundred dollar bill, for instance, is twice as intense as the happiness of gaining a hundred dollar bill. Princeton professor and Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has proven this two-to-one ratio of loss misery to gain happiness in a series of ground-breaking studies.
Loss aversion is the reason we remember the fish that got away more than the one we caught, or remember the spelling bee word we missed more than the one we got right.1
So, back to my slow lines problem. In traffic, grocery lines, and movie lines, we feel more emotion when we’re “losing progress” in the slower line than when we’re “gaining progress” in the faster line. We tend to overlook the gains and remember the losses, because loss creates twice the emotion as gains.
So the truth is, we’re not always in the wrong lane in traffic. It just seems like we are, because we notice our “losses” more.
1Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 62.
