100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People

86. Fear of Loss Trumps Anticipation of Gain

You are preparing a presentation for your project team in which you will suggest that the team change the method they use for the next project. Should you base the presentation on all the advantages that the new method will give the team (anticipation of gain) or on the possible problems and things that will go wrong if they don’t change to the new method (fear of loss)?

One of my favorite pieces of research on unconscious mental processing was conducted by Antoine Bechara and his team (1997). Participants in the study played a gambling game with decks of cards. Each person received $2000 of pretend money. They were told that the goals were to lose as little of the $2000 as possible and to try to make ...