Saturday, January 21, 2017

Remember that....................


...........surviving the evolutionary battle is fairly important:

"The greater sensitivity to negative rather than positive changes is not specific to monetary outcomes," wrote Amos and Danny.  "It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine.  For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object."
     It wasn't hard to imagine what this might be - a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival.  "Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle," they wrote.

-Michael Lewis,  The Undoing Project:  A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

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