Roy Luebke had some interesting comments to my blog post on Five Reasons Why CEO’s Don’t Get Innovation.
He wrote:
“Point #3: Social psychology research has shown that people fear loss more than they covet gain. It is human nature. This is a big hurdle for most people to overcome.”
You should check this interesting entry on Wikipedia on this topic: Loss aversion. These are the first sentences: “In economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.”
Luebke continued:
“Research also shows that most people really dislike change, somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of all people. 10% of people can deal with change but don’t actively pursue it. So 10% of the people are trying to change the other 90%. If I were in Vegas I wouldn’t lay that bet!”
I am thinking along these lines as well, but you will find different takes on this when you search on Google.
An example is a publication (by Michael T. Kanazawa in which he argues that “People don’t hate change. They hate how you’re trying to change them.” Interesting view. Check out his article.
