Sam Johnson

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that it is true that people who are particularly prone to dread are likely to miss out on some of those opportunities.

Yeah, that's the first thing.

The second thing is that people who are more prone to dread also tend to be more impatient.

So if you imagine you needed to have some sort of painful dental procedure, say.

So the kind of typical way of thinking about this in mainstream economics is that people want to put things off as long as possible if it's unpleasant.

Yeah, that's right.

So the interesting thing is that people who are particularly prone to dread, they're more impatient for those types of things, meaning that they want to get over with sooner rather than later.

And although that seems a little bit unintuitive at first, it actually kind of makes sense.

So if you're the type of person who is likely to be focused on this dental procedure for the next three months, you might think like, oh God, I'm not going to have anything else in my mind other than like all this pain for the next three months.

You'd rather just get it over with tomorrow.

So it's a little bit of a counterintuitive consequence of being more dread filled.

Yeah, so what we can say from the research is why dread is a more powerful emotion than savoring.

So why negative things are so much more powerful than positive things.

And basically the reason is that in the case of savoring something positive that's going to happen in the future, there's kind of a good part of it and a bad part of it at the same time.

So suppose that you were in a relationship and the person that you're in love with is going to be away for a month, say.

Well, when they come back, maybe you'll do something really fun together with that person.

Maybe you'll go out partying or something.

So is that something you're going to savor?

How much positive anticipation do you feel about that?