Page 148 - The Social Animal

130 The Social Animal

epidemic expected to kill 600 people. Your top advisors have pre-
pared two alternative programs to combat the disease and have esti-
mated, to the best of their ability, the likely consequences of adopting
each program.
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is a one third probability that
600 people will be saved and a two thirds probability that no
people will be saved.

Ms. or Mr. President, which program do you favor? Please think
about this carefully and answer before you read on.
If you are like most of the subjects in an experiment performed
by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, you would select Program
24
A (72 percent of their subjects selected this option). You might
think to yourself, “Program A guarantees that 200 people will be
saved, and Program B gambles the lives of these people for only a 1
in 3 chance that we could save more lives.”
But suppose your advisors had asked for your judgment in a dif-
ferent manner. Suppose they presented the problem this way:
If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die.
If Program B is adopted, there is a one third probability that
nobody will die and a two thirds probability that 600 people
will die.
Which program would you favor? Please think about this care-
fully and answer the question before reading more.
The two options are functionally identical. In both versions, Pro-
gram A means that 200 people will live and 400 will die; Program B
results in a one third chance that no one will die and 600 people will
live and a two thirds chance that no one will be saved and 600 peo-
ple will die. But for most people, their thinking about the epidemic
is quite different. They think, “If I go with Program A, 400 people
will surely die. I might as well gamble on B.” When asked in this sec-
ond manner, 78 percent of Kahneman and Tversky’s subjects favored
Program B!
Why did such a simple rewording of the options produce such
a drastic switch in answers? Kahneman and Tversky have noted that
people dislike losses and seek to avoid them. It is more painful to