A while back I asked the question, What is competitiveness?
I recently came across an Instagram reel featuring a clip of someone (the account owner, probably) sharing their view on competitiveness. Basically, it boiled down to hating to lose.
I have definitely seen this mentality plenty among those people would tend to label as competitive. You probably have too.
Here’s the thing, though. There’s a well established human tendency to feel more pain from losing something than joy (or whatever) from gaining. It’s called loss aversion. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and Amos Tversky first proposed it as a cognitive bias back in 1979.
If we ALL generally have a bias to feel losing more acutely than winning, can we really say hating to lose is a specific trait of true competitors?
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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