3 ms·
> If one option loses them less money they'll pick that option It's a nice idea to think human beings are strictly rational, but they aren't. We've long known,
by groby_b 2y ago
> If one option loses them less money they'll pick that option
It's a nice idea to think human beings are strictly rational, but they aren't. We've long known, homo economicus had his funeral in the 90s. Amos Tversky murdered him in an entirely rational way.
OK, kidding aside - purely rational decisions are extremely rare.
> but at the end of the day they'll swallow their feelings
People do many things, but they very rarely swallow their feelings. If you've ever seen a neighborhood lawsuit or a divorce, you've seen feelings be extremely powerful things, even if finances are involved.
"unless a tenant is being an outrageous bastard" is the operative phrase there. Feelings color what's considered outrageous. Sometimes, "he looked at me funny" is all that's needed to make an entirely irrational decision.
There's a whole bunch of studies clearly showing that people would rather take a monetary loss than a gain where they think the other party gets an outsized gain (not at their expense) as a result in the latter case. Humans are weird. Feelings matter a lot.
One of my favorites is this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268198000894 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726819...
One of the examples in there is a choice about pay at work
A: You make $50,000; others earn $25,000
B: You make $100,000; others earn $200,00
And a very large number of participants would rather choose A, because that means they'd be relatively better off than their colleagues. Even if they end up with half the income.
- vundercind 2y agoI’m aware of a guy starting a small hog farm out of spite. The size of it, it can only have been costing him money and time and property value. There’s zero chance it was going to annoy his neighbors enough to let him do what he wanted instead (zone it as some kind of dump, iirc) because that would definitely be worse for them, so all this effort and cost was driven by pure spite. He ran it for years.
- bombcar 2y agoThere's an entire category of these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_house You can even make (somewhat slimy) money by identifying these situations; there's money to be made in spiteful divorces, for example.