Anticipating Loss Feels 6 Times Stronger Than Anticipating Gain, Shaping Decision-Making
When people imagine the future, negative outcomes tend to provoke far stronger emotions than positive ones. A new study finds that anticipating a potential loss carries more than six times the emotional impact of imagining an equivalent gain, an imbalance that helps explain why many people shy away from uncertainty and prefer decisions to be settled sooner rather than later.
Analyzing more than three decades of U.K. household survey data, researchers from the University of Bath and the University of Waterloo found that people who experience stronger dread about possible losses are more likely to avoid risk and less willing to wait for delayed outcomes, even when waiting could increase rewards. The findings, published in Cognitive Science, help clarify why risk aversion and impatience so often appear together.
“For many people, the dread of what might go wrong outweighs the pleasure from imagining what might go right. Put simply, the emotional pain from anticipating a £10 loss is far stronger than savoring the thought of a £10 gain,” said Chris Dawson, Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Bath, in a press release.
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Measuring Anticipatory Emotions
Researchers have shown that emotions like dread and savoring affect decision-making, largely through controlled experiments. To see how these emotions operate in everyday life, the team analyzed long-running U.K. household surveys tracking nearly 14,000 individuals between 1991 and 2024.
They examined how people’s psychological well-being shifted alongside expectations about their future finances, whether they believed they would be better off, worse off, or about the same in the year ahead. Those patterns allowed the researchers to estimate how strongly people experienced positive anticipation versus negative anticipation.
On average, negative anticipation dominated. The emotional impact of expecting a loss outweighed the pleasure of expecting a gain by more than sixfold. After outcomes occurred, the gap narrowed as losses still had a stronger emotional effect than gains, but by roughly a factor of two, consistent with existing theories of loss aversion.
Why Dread Connects Risk and Waiting
Decisions such as investing money, changing jobs, or making health choices often involve both uncertainty and delay. The study suggests that dread helps link how people respond to these two factors.
Imagining a negative outcome can generate discomfort that persists as long as uncertainty remains unresolved. Risk introduces the possibility of discomfort, while delay extends it. For people who experience dread more intensely, both risk and waiting become less appealing.
“We see that risk avoidance and impatience are psychologically connected. People try to avoid choices with possible negative outcomes and also prefer outcomes to be resolved sooner, in order to minimise the emotional burden they experience — the dread of anticipating bad news,” said co-author Sam Johnson, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo.
What It Means for Real-World Decisions
People differ widely in how vividly they experience anticipation, which helps explain why attitudes toward risk and patience vary so much. These differences remained even after accounting for factors such as personality, mental health, income, and education.
The results also offer insight into why people sometimes delay or avoid decisions that could benefit them in the long run. In some cases, the anticipation itself becomes the obstacle.
“For example, individuals may delay or avoid medical screening if results take a long time to arrive. Even when screening reduces health risks, the dread of waiting for potentially bad news can discourage testing. Similarly, long waits in areas such as investment decisions can deter engagement simply by prolonging the emotional burden of uncertainty,” said Dawson.
In many situations, the study suggests, what people feel while waiting can influence decisions as much as the outcomes they hope to avoid or achieve.
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