Beneath Loss Aversion Lies Invariant Loss Vigilance
One of the key concepts in Prospect Theory is loss aversion - our tendency to weight losses larger than gains and hence try to avoid them wherever possible.
Despite loss aversion's prominent position in the literature it has been remarked that the basic ideas are rather re-descriptions, that loss aversion is actually hard to find and that attention plays a much more important role (Gigerenzer, 1996; Schmidt & Traub; Yechiam & Hochman, 2013).
In this talk I will use process data from MouselabWeb to demonstrate a correlation as well as a causal relationship between different attention and loss aversion. Then I will go on and suggest 'vigilance' as an underlying concept that might put our understanding of loss aversion on a new path.