army1987 comments on Motivation and Merciless Commitment Contracts - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (70)
It's more complicated than that. As explained in Thinking: Fast and Slow, most people are risk adverse in gains, risk prone in losses, and weigh losses more heavily for gains, but whereas for well-off people gains and losses are measured from the status quo, for the very poor they're counted from a higher level, so that up to a certain point getting more money feels more like a reduced loss than a gain (which is why poor people are more likely to spend sizeable chunks of money on lotteries).
So, it's well possible that the risk of losing 1% of one's money has a different motivational effect for someone very poor than for someone well off.
I have no argument with the proposition that social class, financial wealth and the associated ingrained habits of thought can change the psychological responses to stimulus.