RE: "I Got Downvoted!?! It's Not Fair! Can You Help Me???"
In psychology and behavioral economics, the endowment effect, also known as divestiture aversion and related to the mere ownership effect in social psychology, is the hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them, or in this case perceive they own them.
Seeing your potential rewards without realizing that they are only potential rewards and then seeing them taken away from you plays into this dynamic and exaggerates the feeling of loss. But, as you so clearly described, it's just part of the game we are playing here. Not everyone is going to like your posts every time and your advice to just 'get over it' is spot on.
I used to sell timeshare and we would use fear of loss and hope of gain to get people to buy things they were mentally committed to not purchasing before we even met. The techniques we used leveraged these triggers people have unconsciously and they would start negotiating for things that only a few hours ago they were convinced they didn't need.
People don't get too bent out of shape when someone likes or unlikes a Facebook post they wrote but attach a reward to it with the accompanying fear of loss and we get flag wars and downvote campaigns. I find it so interesting to observe from the sidelines but not enough to really get involved in them as my focus here is all about building community, not tearing them apart.
Triggers, they're a bitch, but they can also be used to get people to take action and do some good in the world.
Heh. Yeah, just about every tyrant (and shady salesperson) in history has always used aspects of our primitive emotional response system to get us to do things we later regret. Timeshares are notorious for burdening people with things they regret for many years. It's not always the case, but usually.
My hope is we can all learn to inoculate ourselves from our irrational, emotional, primitive triggers. When we can master ourselves, then we can master our life and environment. Instead of centrally controlling the masses and pointing them towards doing some good in the world, how fantastic would it be if everyone independently worked towards a better outcome for everyone? Nash equilibrium type stuff.
That would be truly beautiful. That would involve the most advanced parts of our evolutionary path.
Have you been watching the news lately? I don't see this happening any time soon but it would be nice, wouldn't it?
This is the best we can do on a personal level and there are, thankfully, many of us around the world doing just that. Perhaps we'll reach a tipping point one day that will change the world.
I don’t generally watch the news. Why would I? The current form of mainstream media news is specifically designed to tap into the primitive emotional response. It’s not journalism anymore. It’s entertainment which thrives on logical fallacies, fear, and emotional manipulation. Every once in a while I’ll catch the news while in a hotel lobby and think, “To people actually buy this shit?” I can almost count logically fallacies by the minute. It’s ridiculous.
Turning off the news and learning logical fallacies is step one. Reading books like Thinking, Fast and Slow and Predictibly Irrational helps as well.
When you move to Puerto Rico it will become even clearer how the US media pitches complete BS and amazingly people buy into it.