I think this is a fair comment, it’s relevant and sparks an interesting debate about psychology as an overall discipline. Not sure it’s fair to call it unsubstantive.
This isn’t psychology though, it’s economics. It’s one if the most utilized sciences in the public and political world, and it’s really horrible at predicting anything, at least if you look at the statistics of how rarely it’s right.
Loss aversion, and risk aversion as well, are themselves the economic pseudoscience that are based on the psychology of compulsive habits.
This article doesn’t really depict the research paper though. The author isn’t saying loss aversion isn’t real, just that it’s been over popularized in a way that isn’t founded in evidence. It also doesn’t address the other economic pseudoscience on the field, so you could quite literally write the opposite article as well.
Ironically when it was likey the media representation of “loss aversion” that broke the term to begin with.
I want to see what some other commentators who are more knowledgeable about the field say. This is a pretty striking attack against a central theory in... Scientific American? Without citing a wealth of evidence with detailed citations? I find the logic of the argument appealing, finding no inborn bias towards gain nor loss outside of what could be derived by reason would be a very nice thing to say about the future of humanity.
I read D. Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow a number of years back and it did present some pretty clear looking graphs demonstrating loss aversion of 2:1 iirc. I've since lost my copy due to a friend's "borrowing". ;) Certain other elements of his book have come into question, including priming. I'm eagerly waiting to see how the cookie crumbles here.
I agree here. The article mentions ideological complacency, but complacency isn't enough to award 2 Nobel prizes. Loss aversion is, to my layman understanding, a well enough established principle that an article like this without some indication of widespread shift in expert opinion isn't going to change my view of it.
