You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

bogus comments on Open Thread: What are your important insights or aha! moments? - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: Emile 09 November 2014 10:56PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (61)
Tags: open-thread insights

Comments (61)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: bogus 11 November 2014 03:39:31AM 0 points [-]

If someone rejects me, I get sad but not jealous. If she subsequently gets with someone else, I get jealous. I often get somewhat jealous if someone I wasn't particularly interested in gets with someone. But if someone doesn't have a chance to reject me, I experience little or no jealousy relating to her (e.g. if she was in a relationship before I knew her).

Sounds like a clear case of endowment effect. People have done experiments that show this bias occurring with ordinary objects like mugs. So yes, it is "complicated", but in a broadly applicable way.

Comment author: Username 11 November 2014 09:58:13AM 1 point [-]

I object on three counts.

Minorly, the endowment effect seems to be about valuing things more if I own them versus if I don't own them. If my jealousy experience can be pigeonholed into something similar, it would be valuing things more if someone else owns them versus if nobody owns them.

But valuing something more would presumably change the magnitude of my feelings, and that isn't what's happening. Jealousy is a totally different feeling to the sadness I feel from rejection. It's not just a more intense version that I feel because suddenly I like this person more because she's with someone else.

And that formulation also doesn't explain why it's relevant that she had a chance to reject me.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit