When Winning $200 Can Feel Great, or Less So

It’s the journey, not just the outcome
Exploring situations that each ended with the same result, researchers find that a gambler’s ups and downs affected participants’ perception of the experience.

Winning scenarios

Losing scenarios

This preference reversed when the gambler was unlucky. When participants instead lost money after the gambling weekend, they felt better if they had won and lost larger amounts.

Organizations may be able to use this quirk of human cognition to nudge their customers and stakeholders into making decisions that are more closely aligned with their stated aims, Sussman suggests, indicating that each individual piece of information presented is likely to have an impact. For example, an online dieting site that helps customers count calories may show that a person consumed 3,000 calories in a day and burned 2,800—or could show that a person consumed 200 calories more than he burned. Sussman’s research suggests that when a dieter sees the consumed calories along with those burned, he is more likely to focus on the high-magnitude positive impact of having burned 2,800 calories than on the fact that he was 200 calories short of his goal of weight loss. To better focus him on the end result, Sussman suggests presenting the numbers instead as a single figure of net calories burned.