Human beings prefer ‘not losing’ to winning

 TL;DR: Everyone wants to win but if you give the average person a choice between winning and ‘not losing’, they will choose ‘not to lose’ every time.

I first discovered this on holiday with family at Gold Reef City in South Africa. It’s an amazing place BTW - you should add a visit there to your blog post. And the two activities you should do there are the ‘anaconda’ and the ‘tower of terror’ - now back to my story:
My kid brother asked me for some money to play this competition where you pay to throw 2 basketballs in a hoop. If you’re able to get one of them in, you get to keep the basket ball. But the this ball and the situation is designed to make you fail. My brother kept failing and asking for more money until I told him that if he wanted a ball, I was very happy to buy him the ball. He insisted that he wanted to play one more game and didn’t really want to have the ball bought. It amazed him how he care more about playing so that he didn’t lose rather than than having the prize bought for him. He preferred winning the game more than the prize. I started to realise why human beings easily get addicted to gambling.