David Gal

Who they are

Gal studies consumer psychology. The 2018 paper gives his affiliation as the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

The loss of loss aversion: will it loom larger than its gain? (2018), with Rucker. The paper has four parts. It introduces the construct of loss aversion, reviews the evidence offered in its support, asks why acceptance of loss aversion as a general principle remains widespread among social scientists, and proposes a more contextual approach. Its central conclusion, in the authors' words, is that "current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains". The authors connect the persistence of the belief to wider ideas about how beliefs are accepted and maintained in science.

Key ideas

The argument is about generality. Gal and Rucker do not claim that losses never matter more than gains. They argue that the evidence does not support treating the asymmetry as a general law, and that researchers would learn more by asking when losses loom larger and when they do not.

The paper drew replies. In 2020 Kellen Mrkva, Eric J. Johnson, Simon Gächter and Andreas Herrmann reported, across five samples totalling 17,720 people, that loss aversion has moderators, being smaller with knowledge and experience and larger in older consumers, but that people at every level of knowledge were still loss averse. A 2024 meta-analysis led by Alexander L. Brown put the average coefficient in risky choices between 1.8 and 2.1. Daniel Kahneman, asked about the debate in a 2021 interview, said loss aversion was not a law of human nature to be found in every context.

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