The psychology behind why we pay to avoid uncertainty

Most people are familiar with the feeling of anxiety while waiting for the result of a medical test or a job interview. A new study suggests that this feeling of dread is far more powerful than the excitement of looking forward to a positive outcome.

The research indicates that the intensity of this dread drives people to avoid risks and demand immediate results. This behavior explains why impatience and risk-avoidance often appear together in the same individuals. The findings were published in the journal Cognitive Science.

Economists have traditionally viewed risk-taking and patience as separate character traits. A person could theoretically be a daring risk-taker while also being very patient. However, researchers have frequently observed that these two traits tend to correlate. People who are unwilling to take risks are often the same people who are unwilling to wait for a reward.

Chris Dawson of the University of Bath and Samuel G. B. Johnson of the University of Waterloo sought to explain this connection. They proposed that the link lies in the emotions people feel while waiting for an outcome. They distinguished between the feelings experienced after an event occurs and the feelings experienced beforehand.

When an event happens, we feel “reactive” emotions. We feel pleasure when we win money or displeasure when we lose it. But before the event occurs, we engage in “anticipatory” emotions. We might savor the thought of a win or dread the possibility of a loss.

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The researchers hypothesized that these anticipatory emotions are not symmetrical. They suspected that the dread of a future loss is much stronger than the savoring of a future gain. If this is true, it would create a psychological cost to waiting.

To test this theory, Dawson and Johnson analyzed a massive dataset from the United Kingdom. They used the British Household Panel Survey and the Understanding Society study. These surveys followed approximately 14,000 individuals over a period spanning from 1991 to 2024.

The team needed a way to measure dread and savoring without asking participants directly. They developed a novel method using data on financial expectations and general well-being. The survey asked participants if they expected their financial situation to get better or worse over the next year.

The researchers then looked at how these expectations affected the participants’ current happiness. If a person expected to be worse off and their happiness dropped, that drop represented dread. If they expected to be better off and their happiness rose, that rise represented savoring.

The analysis revealed a dramatic imbalance between these two emotional states. The negative impact of anticipating a loss was more than six times stronger than the positive impact of anticipating a gain. This suggests that the human brain weighs future pain much more heavily than future pleasure.

The researchers also measured “reactive” emotions using the same method. They looked at how participants felt after they actually experienced a financial loss or gain. As expected, losses hurt more than gains felt good.

However, the imbalance in reactive emotions was much smaller than the imbalance in anticipatory emotions. Realized losses were about twice as impactful as realized gains. The anticipatory dread was three times more lopsided than the reactive experience.

This finding implies that the waiting period itself is a major source of distress. The researchers describe this phenomenon as “dread aversion.” It is distinct from the more famous concept of loss aversion.

The study then connected these emotional patterns to economic preferences. The survey included questions about the participants’ willingness to take risks in general. It also measured their patience through a delayed gratification scale.

The results showed a strong correlation between high levels of dread and risk-avoidance. People who experienced intense dread were much less likely to take risks. This makes sense within the researchers’ framework.

Taking a gamble creates a situation where a negative outcome is possible. This possibility triggers dread. By avoiding the risk entirely, the individual removes the source of the dread.

The results also showed a strong connection between dread and impatience. People who felt high levels of dread were less willing to wait for rewards. This also aligns with the researchers’ model.

Waiting for an uncertain outcome prolongs the experience of dread. A person who hates waiting may simply be trying to shorten the time they spend feeling anxious. They choose immediate rewards to stop the emotional wheel from spinning.

The study found that savoring plays a much smaller role in decision-making. The pleasure of imagining a good outcome is generally weak. This may be because positive anticipation is often mixed with the fear that the good event might not happen.

The authors checked to see if these results were simply due to personality traits. For example, a person with high neuroticism might naturally be both anxious and risk-avoidant. The researchers controlled for the “Big Five” personality traits in their analysis.

Even after accounting for neuroticism and other traits, the effect of dread remained. This suggests that the asymmetry of anticipatory emotions is a distinct psychological mechanism. It is not just a symptom of being a generally anxious person.

This research offers a unified explanation for economic behavior. It suggests that risk preferences and time preferences are not independent. They are both shaped by the desire to manage anticipatory emotions.

The authors use the analogy of a roulette wheel to explain their findings. When a person bets on roulette, they are not just weighing the odds of winning or losing. They are also deciding if they can endure the feeling of watching the wheel spin.

If the dread of losing is overwhelming, the person will not bet at all. If they do bet, they will want the wheel to stop as quickly as possible. The act of betting creates a stream of emotional discomfort that lasts until the result is known.

There are some limitations to this study. It relies on observational data rather than a controlled experiment. The researchers inferred emotions from survey responses rather than measuring them physiologically.

Additionally, the study assumes that changes in well-being are caused by financial expectations. It is possible that other unmeasured factors influenced both happiness and expectations. However, the use of longitudinal data helps to account for stable individual differences.

The findings have implications for various sectors. In healthcare, patients might avoid screening tests because the dread of a bad result outweighs the benefit of knowing. Reducing the waiting time for results could encourage more people to get tested.

In finance, investors might choose low-return savings accounts over stocks to avoid the anxiety of market fluctuations. This “dread premium” could explain why safe assets are often overvalued. Investors pay a price for emotional tranquility.

Future research could investigate how to modify these anticipatory emotions. If people can learn to reduce their dread, they might make better long-term decisions. Techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy could potentially help investors and patients manage their anxiety.

The study provides a new lens through which to view human irrationality. We often make choices that look bad on paper because we are optimizing for our current emotional state. We are willing to pay a high price to avoid the shadow of the future.

The study, “Asymmetric Anticipatory Emotions and Economic Preferences: Dread, Savoring, Risk, and Time,” was authored by Chris Dawson and Samuel G. B. Johnson.