The quantity of man’s pleasure from a ten- dollar gain does not exactly match

the quantity of his displeasure from a ten-dollar loss. That is, the loss seems

to hurt much more than the gain seems to help. Moreover, if a man almost gets

something he greatly wants and has it jerked away from him at the last moment,

he will react much as if he had long owned the reward and had it jerked away. I

include the natural human reactions to both kinds of loss experience—the loss of

the possessed reward and the loss of the almost-possessed reward—under one

description, Deprival-Superreaction Tendency.

 

In displaying Deprival-Superreaction Tendency, man frequently incurs

disadvantage by misframing his problems. He will often compare what is near

instead of what really matters. For instance, a man with $10 million in his

brokerage account will often be extremely irritated by the accidental loss of

$100 out of the $300 in his wallet.

 

The Mungers once owned a tame and good- natured dog that displayed the canine

version of Deprival-Superreaction Tendency. There was only one way to get bitten

by this dog. And that was to try and take some food away from him after he

already had it in his mouth. If you did that, this friendly dog would

automatically bite. He couldn’t help it. Nothing could be more stupid than for

the dog to bite his master. But the dog couldn’t help being foolish. He had an

automatic Deprival-Superreaction Tendency in his nature.

 

Humans are much the same as this Munger dog. A man ordinarily reacts with