Sam Johnson

For some people, dread is just a much more powerful emotion than savoring.

And for those people, they tend to avoid taking risks where the risk is something that they'd have to take

A decision that I have to make now about something that's going to happen in the future.

So the risk would be resolved in the future.

Yeah, so if you think about the type of person who is really focused on financial risks, those types of people might be very unlikely to start businesses, for example, because it's the type of thing where it's going to be potentially months or years before you find out what the outcome is going to be.

And when you're kind of ruminating or focusing on those sorts of negative emotions about the present, then it makes you think, okay, maybe this risk isn't something that I want to take.

Whereas people who have a more balanced attitude where they think, okay, there's some positive things that might happen from starting this business.

There's also some negative things.

Those people are more willing to take calculated risks.

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.