Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

which is to give the money and move on.

That to me is the harder kind of question, and this kind of question comes up not just in these kind of one-on-one interactions, but in cases like how people donate money to charities.

One of the things people suggest is that there's a real preference for in-kind donations, like people prefer to donate food to food shelters rather than money to food shelters.

in part because the food feels like it's less vulnerable to being exploited or used for things like drugs, something like that.

But that fear, the fear that the money is going to be somehow taken advantage of leads people to make sort of less efficient donations because actually from the food shelters point of view, it's a lot more efficient for them to get $10 in cash than it is for them to get $10 in canned goods.

That's a really good point.

Some of the research on regret, which I think is obviously tied very tightly into the idea of being a sucker, because suckers obviously really regret agreeing to something.

There's a super interesting research on regret that basically says the things that makes people nervous is the decisions they make that they know that they're going to find out whether or not they made the right decision or the wrong decision.

Whereas you're right, in the situation I'm describing, I was never going to know.

And I'd rather not know.

I could be blissfully ignorant.

My message is often the fear of being a sucker feels so intense that it's a little bit closer to a true phobia where people don't want to go anywhere near it.

It takes up more space than we actually intend to give it.

And so it's totally sensible to think rationally about what kind of deals are going to yield outcomes that you want.

Do I want to buy this product?

Do I want to make this investment?

Do I want to make this loan?

Those things, it's totally sensible to think, what is the outcome here really going to be?

But that oftentimes the fear of playing the sucker gets to take up a ton of space in the decision that it doesn't actually deserve.

And so my message in a lot of ways is,