Gain and Risk

Video Transcription

Hi, I'm Julie Tietz. And welcome to Conflict Resolution-- putting the pieces together. Today, we're going to cover gain and risk-- playing to win versus playing not to lose. So let's get started off with our key terms.

Potential gain-- what an individual values and may obtain as a result of a given decision. Risk of loss-- the chance that a person will not attain his or her goal and/or lose something valued as a result of choosing a particular option in a decision.

Decision making, we find ourselves looking at potential gains. And this is where we hope to have our needs met. But we aren't sure that it's possible. We are hoping that our needs will be met, however. And then also there is a risk of loss in decision making. This is where we fear that our needs could be left unmet.

And this is a movement away from meeting the needs whereas the potential gain is a movement towards. So you can kind of think of decision making as a chess game where we are evaluating and examining what our potential gains are moving a specific piece or making a specific decision or what we could lose if we make a specific move or we make a specific decision.

In decision making, we are again trying to minimize loss and maximize gain through each of our decisions. And we are doing this through prioritizing our needs in our mind. So we are evaluating what needs are most important to us and what decisions we make-- how it will affect a gain or minimize a loss. So we're always trying to get the most that we can out of certain situations. And we're also trying to lose the less or minimize the loss that we can through making our decisions.

So let's see what this looks like in a few examples here. Let's say we're trying to save time. And so we are trying to maximize our time by going on a shopping trip with multiple spots versus going to one spot at a certain time of day versus going through all of them in one specific time. So we're trying to minimize losing our time by maximizing the time that we do allow for all of our shopping needs.

Or maybe we are making a decision on a large purchase. And we are trying to maximize our quality of the product versus minimizing the loss of the expense of purchasing this product. Or we also see it in playing a game. Again, going back to our chess game example earlier, we are always trying to find the best moves that we can in order to minimize any loss, whether that's through a specific move or strategy that we find in the game.

An interesting little tidbit about decision-making research is found that avoiding loss is more important than making gains in decisions. So we would rather not lose something than gain something. Isn't that interesting? You would think that we would want to do or make decisions where we can get the gains. But we rather just not lose something rather than gain something. I think that's really interesting about decision making and how our minds work in these situations.

So tying this information on gains and risks with conflict resolution processes, it's important to know that conflict resolution process is effective when parties feel that they're going to get more out of this process versus losing something. And so when I'm in a conflict resolution process, let's say I'm doing a mediation, I like to frame the process to the parties as what have you got to lose? I literally ask this question when we are setting up a process.

And this is because truly what do the parties have to lose? They have nothing to lose. If the process doesn't go well, or they don't come up with agreement, well, they're not any better off than where they started. But if they do work through the process and contribute and make a full faith effort to resolve the issue, then they have gained so much more and are a little bit more competent in working on issues in the future.

So now we've covered gain and risk, playing to win versus playing not to lose, let's go over our key points. A gain is a movement towards the hope of meeting our needs in decision making. And a loss would be a fear of having our needs unmet or a movement away. And in decision making, we are trying to maximize our gain and minimize our loss through our decisions. So we're trying to make the most out of every situation that we possibly can.

And in conflict resolution, it's most effective when there is more potential gain and less risk of loss. So in framing the process to parties as hey, what have you got to lose, may make it more effective and more-- and the parties more willing to follow along in the process. Thank you so much for taking the time out to view this tutorial. I hope that you've learned something. And I can't wait to catch you again next time.